Pimletz shuffles into the Record-Transcript offices a half hour early and a couple hours shy of a night’s rest. Sleep didn’t come easy, and when it finally did, it didn’t matter.
He’s energized, still, by his swollen effort on the Wood obit, eager to soak up what there might be of collegial praise. He’ll even take grudging acknowledgment. Anything. Been forever since someone’s noticed something he’s written. Last time he made the front page was during Reagan’s first term—yes?—when the paper played the shooting death of a twelve-year-old Roxbury drug dealer way beyond deserving. Back then, the paper had a managing editor named Charlie (“King”) Tuthill, and the man was legendarily hot for any story to accent the desperation of Boston’s inner city youth. This was his thing. Janet Cooke’s faux Pulitzer had come and not yet gone, and King Tut was on the prowl for anything that might put his own rag on the same map. Guy would rub two stones together and call it an avalanche. This Roxbury youth had been gunned down in an otherwise innocuous dispute over an ounce of pedestrian dope, and Pimletz was called in to dress up the kid’s adolescent life and hard times with the kind of sorry prose for which he was not yet known.
This time, too, the front page was not awarded to Pimletz for anything he had written, but for what he was asked, by default, to write. It fell to him, is all. The significant play had nothing to do with Axel Pimletz and everything to do with Terence Wood. The front page was there to be filled.
Even so, Pimletz is plenty pleased with himself as he strolls to the paper’s reception area to pinch a couple more copies of the four-star final. He wants a complete set, a front page from every edition (maybe he’ll have them framed, side by side, for one of his bare walls), and he also wants some extras, just to have. You never know, he’s thinking, as he lifts seven or eight copies from the stack by the main elevators. He hugs the papers close, partly to conceal his excessive filching, but also for the strange comfort and assurance they offer. They are like a blanket to him, these newspapers, a protective coating, and the heavythick smell of newsprint reaches him like he matters. Yes, he thinks to himself, inhaling deeply. Yesyesyes.
There is so much ink committed to the sixty-point front-page headline—WOOD’S EXIT?—that Pimletz’s fingers and clothing are right away rubbed black with the residue. This kind of mess he doesn’t notice, at first, and when he does, he doesn’t mind. This kind of mess he can get all over his not-pressed white shirt and probably when he gets home, he’ll just hang the thing in his closet and leave the stains where they are. This kind of mess is a validation.
In truth, Pimletz’s obit/tribute/send-off is just a sidebar to the lead story, but he rubs up against the banner headline as if it were his own. He walks the stack of papers to his desk and brings his nose to the front page of the one on top, breathes it in like it could not have been the front page without him. Who knows, he considers, working at some perspective, while somehow managing to keep himself in the picture. The headline to his own piece is far smaller than the banner—TERENCE WOOD: A MAN OF PARTS, in twenty-four–point, uppercase—but he chooses to view it in context.
Inhaling, still, he reminds himself of the kids in his elementary school pressing the teachers’ freshly mimeographed assignment sheets to their faces, breathing deeply at the hard scents of knowledge, importance, technology. The smells are nothing alike, but the essence is the same. It’s been thirty-five years, and he’s moved from there to here, just.
He follows his story to the jump at the back of the paper, to look again at the spread of accompanying photos. Often, in the writing, Pimletz tries to picture his fallen subjects in his mind, to bring them back to life, although it rarely occurs to him to seek out an actual photograph while it still might impact on his actual prose. With Terence Wood, it would have been nothing to stop at the photo desk or to pull some clips from the morgue to help with his half-hearted attempts at visualization. It would have been nothing and everything, both. Instead, now, taking in the dozen or so images chosen by the photo desk to illustrate the actor’s noted accomplishments, Pimletz kicks himself for what he’s missed. There’s a lot. There’s that famous windswept still from The Half Shell, which Pimletz has, by this time, seen all over the television news accounts, and with each sighting, moved further from fathoming how he had somehow neglected to discuss the guy’s breakthrough movie. There was that fleeting relationship with one of the Nixon girls, captured here in an uncaptioned paparazzi shot from some years-ago charity function. The romance sputtered after only a few weeks, but, by the time it did, it had made enough noise along both coasts that there might have been some indication of it in Pimletz’s piece. There were screen collaborations with more Hollywood luminaries than Pimletz now cares to count—and more, apparently, than he cared to mention. There is even a photo of a baby-faced Wood testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but Pimletz seems not to have had the inclination to elaborate on the actor’s role in these proceedings.
Oh, well. His glaring omissions are enough to counter his enthusiasm over the Wood story, but not enough to leave him despondent. Really, it hadn’t gone that badly, considering. (In consideration of what, Pimletz is not quite sure, but it never hurts to qualify things.) He did get to do his job, on deadline, over fifty column inches. He did cover the basics, basically. He did get a quote from Scorcese—something about how Wood managed to occupy more space than he actually took up (a positive quality, Pimletz is assuming)—and he did find some compelling anecdotal material from Wood’s early years. And the kicker is the front fucking page, deserving or no. There he is, for all of greater Boston to see, or dismiss, or gloss over. “By Axel Pimletz.” That he’s missed a few of the particulars does not dim the light he was able to shine on Terence Wood’s life and presumed death. Hopefully. And anyway, who the hell will know the difference?
“You call this an obit?” Hamlin, two desks over, pulls Pimletz from his post-mortem like he’s on a string. Either he’s noticed the holes in Pimletz’s effort, or he’s jerking him around.
“You mean, apart from the fact that this guy may or may not be dead?” Pimletz says back. He means to hang tough, to keep Hamlin and anyone else with the same idea from spoiling his already uncertain sense of accomplishment. He’s feeling good enough about himself, doesn’t want to lose it.
“Apart from that.”
“Apart from that, yeah, why not? It’s all there.”
Hamlin moves quickly for the kill: “Was it Julie he nailed, or Tricia?”
Jesus, Pimletz thinks, this guy doesn’t miss a thing. He throws up his palms in easy surrender. “Fine,” he says, not wanting to argue Hamlin on this one. “Fine. So I fucked up. Beat me, whip me, fuck me dead.”
“Just making a point,” Hamlin says, disingenuous, moving from the attack to the defensive.
“Point being?”
“Point being it wasn’t just you who fucked up, it was the whole fucking process fell apart. It’s this sorry ass rag we write for. One guy fucks up, it’s not a problem, it happens, but there’s no checks and balances. No system. That’s the fucking problem. One hand’s got no fucking clue what the other is doing.”
Pimletz sees Hamlin is revving himself up, and when this guy gets going on what’s wrong with the Record-Transcript, or newspapers in general, or the decline in the ability of the general population to distinguish between its ass and the couch it’s sitting on, there’s no derailing him. He’s like a rollercoaster gone berserk. Here it comes: “This is just one thing, but it’s everything. No one knows what anyone else is doing around here. Who’s minding the fucking store? I mean, don’t take this personal, Axel, but come on, if some goddamn hack is going to drop the ball on a story, then Volpe and whoever the hell he’s got working the copy desk and running photos should know better than to call attention to it. ‘Hey! Look! Our guy fucked up! Here’s pictures to prove it!’ What the fuck are these people thinking?” Hamlin’s words generate their own momentum as he talks, he’s picking up speed: “I’ll tell you what the fuck they’re thinking, they’re not thinking anything, that’s the fucking problem. Nobody’s thinking. That’s the crux right there. That’s it. These assholes haven’t had a thought in their heads since they thought to apply for their damn jobs, and who knows what they were thinking then?”
Hamlin runs his fingers through his not-baled hair, catches up with his breath. “Okay, fine, so you missed a couple points on this actor,” he says. “Big fucking deal. But how in the fuck can they run those pictures without fixing the holes in your story? This is basic stuff. Either they shit-can the pictures or plug your story.” Hamlin has whipped himself into such a complete frenzy it appears he might choke on the foam in his mouth. He slows, trying to determine if he’s made his point. “Am I right or am I right?”
“This is a rhetorical question?” Pimletz wants to know.
“This is a rhetorical question.”
“In that case, asked and answered.”
“Fine,” Hamlin concludes, and underneath his conclusion, he’s wondering how it is he lets himself get all lathered around a guy like Pimletz. Asked and answered. What the hell kind of way to talk is that? It’s like talking to a fucking sitcom lawyer, to a guy who’s being paid by the ten-dollar word. Once, Pimletz made the mistake of confiding that he sometimes makes an effort to work new words and phrases into his conversation, and Hamlin has been able to spot his lame attempts at vocabulary-building ever since. Asked and answered. Jesus.
“Fine,” Pimletz echoes.
“Civet,” Hamlin says.
“Civet?”
“For your precious vocabulary. It’s the fatty secretion of an animal. As in, the fucking cat got its civet all over the fucking place.”
“Fuck you, Hamlin.”
“Fuck me,” Hamlin concurs. “Put me in my place.” He’s had about enough fun at poor Pimletz’s expense. There’s no sport in it. It’s like the Red Sox playing those fuckers out at Harvard. Unchallenged, disinterested, he retreats to his desk and turns on his computer. By the time the prompts appear on his warmed screen, he has rolled his sleeves, sugared his coffee, sorted the mess of papers at his desk, and speed-dialed one of the mayor’s top advisors for a comment on the just-proposed city budget.
Pimletz looks on and can’t help but marvel at this guy. He gets going like that on what’s wrong with the paper, on and on, and then he just lets it go, moves on to the next thing. Plus, he’s got more next things than anyone. He’s exceeded his quota of next things. His next things are corralled into one of those snake lines they’ve got at the bank, waiting for Hamlin’s next available piece of attention. With Pimletz, it’s the other way around. He’s the one on line, endlessly waiting for some next thing to fill his day, to move him forward. He can look up civet in the dictionary, but that’s about it.
“Hey, Axel,” Hamlin hollers, when he’s off the phone with city hall, waiting for his next call to go through. He’s gotten a second wind with his razzing. His eyes are fixed on his terminal as he talks, he doesn’t swivel to face his target. He doesn’t need to look at Pimletz to know he has his ear. “This is what I’m thinking,” he says, typing, leaning over to lap at his coffee. “I’m thinking either it’s Ash Wednesday, or whatever it is you people celebrate, or you’ve been moonlighting as a fucking chimney sweep.” He keeps typing as he talks, working his budget story.
“Say again?” Pimletz tries. He’s got no idea where his heckling friend is going with this one. Somewhere. Usually he can tell.
“The newsprint, Axel. What’s with the newsprint?”
“Oh,” Pimletz says, “that.” He holds out his hands to check the damage. “Hands could use a wash.”
“Fuck the hands,” Hamlin says. “Look at the rest of you. Look at your face. You look like you been working in a fucking mine.”
Pimletz has no idea what Hamlin is talking about, can’t tell from his reflection in his dull terminal screen, but then he flashes back to a picture of himself putting his nose to the front page, and he thinks, Jesus, what a stupid fucking thing to do! Things are difficult enough around here, and he has to go compound his problems by getting caught smelling the goddamn newspaper.
Hamlin, swallowed once more by his next things, is deep into his story, back on the phone, so Pimletz slinks a couple desks over to Sam Haskins’s station and cracks the box of Baby Fresh baby wipes his fastidious colleague keeps by his terminal. Haskins isn’t in yet, most people aren’t in yet, and Pimletz pulls one of the aloescented, hypoallergenic sheets and rubs at his hands. The wipe is wetter than it needs to be. It’s supposed to be alcohol free, according to the label on its box, but it smells faintly medicinal as Pimletz reaches it to his face. He keeps one eye on Hamlin as he wipes himself. He’s satisfied he’s not being watched, but he lets his other eye take in the Baby Fresh packaging. He is satisfied to learn that he is not only cleaning the newsprint from his face and hands, but he is also moisturizing his skin with benzoic acid and grapefruit seed extract—a good side benefit. When he finishes, he tosses the spent wipe into Haskins’s lined waste bin, dries his hands against his pants, and returns to his own desk, largely unnoticed and somewhat refreshed.
“Fresh as a baby’s bottom?” Hamlin chides, his back still to Pimletz.
“You working or keeping tabs?” Pimletz says. Fucker is all over him, riding him, all the time, and this is the best he can manage. Once, just once, Pimletz would love to come up with something that might put this guy in his place.
“Both,” Hamlin snaps back, punching out a new number, from memory, on the telephone. “I’m also chewing gum and cleaning my oven.” He swivels around to face Pimletz and reclines his chair. “See,” he says, chewing loudly. He rubs at his stomach and pats his head. “I can also do this,” he continues. Then he switches to patting his stomach and rubbing his head. “And this.”
“The Amazing Hamlin!” Pimletz teases back. “Miracle reporter!” He’s not sure whether to play along or to lean into the guy for his baiting.
Hamlin swivels back to his work, leaving Pimletz to figure if what has just passed between them has really just passed between them, if it was simply some stressful, one-sided interoffice rough-housing, or something else. He can never be certain with Hamlin, and just as his figuring has got him leaned to where he can imagine some affection underneath his colleague’s steady ribbing, Hamlin delivers a final blow to tilt his figuring the other way. “Maybe your friend Sam would be kind enough to leave a box of his moist towelettes in the Men’s,” Pimletz hears from the back of Hamlin’s head. “Never know when you might need to freshen up.”
Great, Pimletz thinks. Just fucking great.
One thing about Anita Tollander Wood Veerhoven: she is famous for the way she can’t make coffee, even instant. She never remembers if she should round off her spoons, or level them, or what. This was one of Terence Wood’s running complaints during their years together, one that ran with him to his next marriage, to Pet. His replacement, Nils Veerhoven, a Norwegian rug cleaner with unnecessarily curly hair and a smear of moustache, doesn’t seem to mind. Nils’s drink is cocoa, and he makes it himself.
“Just some bottled water,” Petra Wood says, when Anita asks her to join her in a second cup only five minutes after pouring her first. “If you have.”
“Tap,” Anita replies. “This is New Hampshire.”
“Tap, then.” Beat. “It’s okay to drink?”
“Yes, it’s okay to drink. You’re drinking it now. That’s what’s in the coffee.”
“Maybe that should tell me something,” Petra says, laughing gently at her friend’s expense. (Back home, she makes her coffee with Evian.)
It is late morning, but early for Pet, forget the time difference. Plane arrived at Logan about ten last night, and by the time she pulled into her friend’s drive, after some trouble with her bags, it was past Letterman. Nashua is, like, nowhere, she was thinking, driving, following the directions in the beam of map light supplied by her rented Sunbird. Make a wrong turn up here and you’re gone.
Anita laughs back, happy to have so much shared history suddenly perched across her kitchen table. She needs this. With Nils, there’s been a surface comfort—Oh, Nita, how awful it must be for you! Tell me what you need—but there’s no connection, now, about what’s happened to Wood. How could she expect a connection? He tries, Nils, he wants to be there for her, but his there is not the same place as hers. She’s in a completely different zip code. It’s been more than twenty-four hours since she first heard, and she’s walking around like someone’s cut her arms off, that’s how helpless and desperate the accident has made her feel. Alone. She’s been left lost, crazy, unfocused, and she’s hoping maybe Pet can pull her back in time for Norman.
God, Norman. Don’t even get her started about Norman. He left New York early this morning, borrowed his roommate’s car, said to look for him around lunch. At least she didn’t have to tell him. Some jerk wire service reporter took care of that, and as enraged as she was to learn of the way her son absorbed word of his father’s probable death—in the hall, outside some screening room, delivered cellularly by some interloping journalist who thought it appropriate to pull Norman from class for a comment—she was also grateful. What would she have said? Oh, Norman, by the way. . . . There’re no words to tell something like this. There’s no way to hear it. This way, at least, he knows.
Pet’s mind isn’t focused yet on these unfamiliar surroundings or on the unsettling tragedy that seems to be happening, still, to some other set of people. It’s happening, sort of, but it’s not happening to her. It’s like she’s not paying good attention, like she’s watching a documentary that can’t quite hold her interest. (Plus, she’s in New Hampshire.) She thinks this is something she can undo, reinvent, that the facts of her estranged husband’s apparent demise can be rewritten as easily as one of his lousy scripts. She thinks this must be what people mean when they say something is surreal.
Also, she’s not fully awake, and she has yet to move after the endless drive of the night before, or the long flight that preceded it. “Live free or die,” she says, in mid-distraction. “What the hell is that?” This has been troubling her.
Anita’s thinking, we should be doing something here, must be someone we can call: police, lawyers, private investigators, someone. There’s this psychic down in Jersey, some sweet old lady, she’s been on all the talk shows with her knack for discovering dead bodies and missing persons, maybe she has some ideas. Then she’s thinking, no, we should leave the line clear, case someone is trying to reach us, that’s what we should be doing. She’s thinking she should have had that call waiting put in by the phone company back when it was being offered, free installation, even if she can’t stand it. Times like this are when you need a feature like call waiting. Maybe Norman’s having car trouble, maybe he’s trying to call. Maybe Terence has turned up on a piece of Pathfinder or driftwood a couple miles down the coast. Maybe he’s delirious or comatose. Maybe he’s lost his short-term memory. Maybe he’s asking for her. There are, like, a couple dozen things to consider, viable things, and she is startled when Pet introduces yet another. “What the hell is what?” she manages.
“On the license plates,” Pet explains, as if it were plain. “Live free or die. I’m driving here, middle of the night, I pull over for gas, and every car at the pump has to tell me this. Live free or die. Live free or die. Like I need all these cars to be telling me this.”
“Figures,” Pet says, realizing. “But what does it mean? Think about it. Live free or die. What the hell is that doing on everyone’s car?”
“You know, I don’t really know,” Anita allows. She’s never considered the question before, and this surprises her, now that she’s been asked. She’s lived in New Hampshire a half-dozen years, and it’s never come up. “Probably just a patriot thing,” she guesses.
“Patriots, the football team?”
“No, patriots the patriots,” Anita says. “American Revolution. Paul Revere. Taxation without representation. That whole deal.”
“Oh,” Pet says, realizing again. “Right.” For a moment, she’d forgotten where she was. She downs her tap water in one long pull, presses the cool of the empty glass against her forehead, rolls it around up there like she saw someone do in a movie. Faye Dunaway, maybe. She’s trying to startle herself awake, into focus. Pay attention, she summons herself. Pay attention. “What’s to eat?” she wonders, thinking food might help.
Anita stands, peeks into the fridge. “Eggs,” she announces. “I could make omelettes.”
“Omelettes sounds good.”
“Better yet,” Anita continues, now by the pantry closet, “there should be a box of matzos in here, still good.” She’s rummaging among her shelves, back to where the hardly used containers of honey and syrup have left their gooey imprints on her flowery shelving paper. There’s rice back here from the day she moved in; she’s afraid to open the package to see what’s inside.
Pet sees where her friend is going with this and smiles, remembering. Wife number one, Elaine (or, “the Jewess,” as she is alternately known to wives two and three), used to cook up this breakfast thing called matzo bry, which was basically just scrambled eggs and crackers. Wood went crazy for the stuff, and he was always asking Anita and, later, Pet to whip him up some. He was no more Jewish than Billy Graham, but this was his idea of a treat, and he had Anita collect the recipe from Elaine, and Pet from Anita, like it was some goddamn heirloom. And it’s not like it was any big deal of a recipe, just eggs and matzo, hard to screw up eggs and matzo, but he liked it prepared with Tabasco sauce and dill leaves and whatever else Elaine used to throw into the mix. (Also ketchup, in the pan, if she’s remembering it right.) Tell the truth, Pet developed a taste for the stuff herself, although not to where she would ever fix a plate without Wood. “You keep matzo?” she asks her friend. “What’s that all about? Nils is Jewish? Veerhoven is a Jewish name?”
Anita, from inside the pantry: “About as Jewish as Mamie Eisenhower.” She doesn’t know where she gets this, but the connection makes her laugh.
Pet, too, and, for a moment, the two wives are lost in a wave of shared silliness. “So?” she presses, out from under her laughing.
“I cook with it,” Anita says, emerging from the pantry to explain her matzo stash. “Puddings, soup stock, things like that. Not much lately, but I keep some around.” She places the box down on the counter and begins breaking sheets of matzo into bite-size pieces.
Pet steps from the table to help with the eggs. She cracks them awkwardly with two hands, as if she hasn’t spent much time in a kitchen. She has her thumbs do most of the work. “One or two?” she asks, holding up an egg. “Eggs.”
“Whatever,” Anita says. “Might as well do them all. Maybe Nils will want.”
Cracking, Pet tells how once she left the matzo to soak in the egg-beat for something like four or five minutes, and how when she cooked it all up, she was left with a plate of what basically amounted to eggs and wet soup crackers. “Wood didn’t say anything, though,” she says, “just cleaned his plate without a word.”
“He’d eat anything.”
“Telling me.”
“Him and his Oreos,” Anita recalls. “Remember?”
How could Pet forget? She still has a shelf full of them in her own cupboard back home. She’s been doling them out to herself, one a day, since Wood moved out. She tells this to her friend.
“You’re holding on to him,” Anita interprets. “When you eat the last cookie, that’s when you can let him go. I’m surprised you don’t see it.”
“You think?”
“Yes, I think. I don’t see what else it could be. You don’t eat Oreos. Why else would you be eating Oreos all of a sudden?”
Pet shrugs. “It’s just one a day.”
“This is why,” Anita concludes. “My God, this is exactly what you’re doing. Exactly. You’re usually so on about these things.”
“But we were getting a divorce,” Pet says, trying to understand herself. “This is stupid. We were divorcing.”
“But there’s a piece of you thinks maybe you would have worked it out, am I right?”
“What, worked it out? There were teams of lawyers on this thing. It was ugly. It wasn’t a work-it-out kind of thing.”
“What about maybe underneath the ugliness, maybe there was some secret hope, something, that things could get back to how they were?”
Pet looks at Anita blankly.
“Don’t tell me you never thought of it,” Anita says.
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“I won’t tell you I never thought of it.”
“Seriously, Pet.”
“I am being serious. What we had was gone. Just like what you had was gone. That’s Wood.”
“But privately, in your most secret, secret places, tell me you’re not still in love with him.” Beat. “Forget me. Tell yourself.”
She’s fishing here, Anita, but she fishes with such conviction that Pet begins to recognize herself. She wants to accept what Anita is saying. Of course, she lets herself think. She’s too close to have seen it, but suddenly it’s clear. It’s so obvious. Of course she still loves him. This is just her way of keeping him near. Oreos. One each day. Now and forever. And now especially. She can’t let go. It doesn’t occur to Pet that Wood is dead or even that he might be dead. She’s forgotten, for a moment, the dreadful news that brought her here. She’s thinking in terms of the day before yesterday, of calling off her attorneys, of going back home to her husband. She’s thinking everything is as it was, and maybe she’ll just go back into therapy to figure this further. Maybe she’ll find some way to control herself and bring her emotions into better check, or maybe, when she gets home, she’ll simply take all those unopened bags of Oreos over to the food drop by her dry cleaners. But, as she’s thinking these things, her friend is busy reeling in an even better explanation for her behavior.
“Of course,” Anita continues, this time with not nearly so much conviction, “there’s always the possibility that maybe you just like Oreos. Maybe after all these years he just wore you down.” She laughs as she says this, mostly because it strikes her as funny, but also because she wants Pet to know she’s just fooling around.
Petra Wood ponders this and feels taken, duped. First Anita gets her going on what might have been a momentous personal revelation, and then she makes like she’s just kidding. Boom. Never mind. Ha ha. “Fuck you,” Pet says. She’s pissed, but she’s trying to return Anita’s playfulness. “Fuck you very much.” She grabs the empty egg carton and tosses it at her friend. It lands at her feet.
“My pleasure,” Anita says, stepping over the carton to the stove. She flicks some of her own saliva into the saucepan to see if it sizzles.
“Gross,” Pet says, noticing.
“Oh, come on. Like you’ve never done it.”
“Not when I’m cooking for someone else,” Pet insists. “And not when someone else could see me, no.”
“Well, we’ll just pretend you didn’t see, okay?”
“Easy for you to say,” Pet says, and then lets it drop. Her mind is someplace else.
“Dry or runny?” Anita asks, spilling the egg-beat into the pan.
Pet comes back from wherever she was and thinks they’re still talking about the spittle, but then she gets that it’s about the eggs. “In between,” she says.
Nils’s pickup rumbles unmuffled into the carport. He was out on an early flood job this morning before the rest of the house was awake, and he’s not sure what he’ll find back inside. This has troubled him all morning.
Pet hasn’t seen him yet—he couldn’t wait up last night with Anita—and she goes to intercept him and make trouble. “Nilsy!” she cries, throwing open her arms. She’s wearing one of Anita’s robes, no sash, and when she spreads her arms, the robe opens with them. Underneath, she’s got on an Everything’s Archie T-shirt from Wood’s last movie, nonmerchandized panties, and that’s it. She knows poor Nils will blush from the exposure. “How’s my Swedish meatball?” she says, collecting him for a hug and adding all kinds of color to his face. She doesn’t care that he’s from Norway. Norway, Sweden, it’s all the same to her. Denmark, even.
Petra Wood is everywhere on Nils, all at once. She kisses him on the lips, cups his ass, runs her fingers through his thick curls.
“Pet,” he says, untangling himself from her groping. “Good that you’re here.” He’s flustered, his cheeks the color of cartoon embarrassment. “You might want to do something about that robe.”
“Oh, don’t be such a prude,” Pet chides, and then she snaps the robe open and shut, and open and shut, like a flasher. “Wake up, Nashua!” she screams across the street. “It’s showtime!” Then to Anita, who has joined them on the front walk, she says, “He’s mine, you know. I’m next in line.” To Nils: “I get all her leftovers.”
“I’m not through with him yet,” Anita says, moving to rescue her proper husband from Pet’s teasing. She wraps his arm around her shoulders like a stole.
“Yeah, well, when you’re done,” Pet says, taking Nils’s other arm. To Nils, in a hot whisper: “We share everything, you know.”
Nils laughs uncertainly and walks the two women to his kitchen door. This is not a comfortable thing for him. This is not the way he is with people, not what he expected to find here this morning, but he can’t think how to move the situation to where he can relax around it. There is no gentlemanly way for him to squirm free of Petra without also losing hold of Anita, so he leaves his arms where they are. And there is no way for him to silence his wife’s friend or voice his disapproval without setting an unpleasant tone for the rest of the morning. All he can do is wait for it to pass. This is not the way he expected his day to go. He spent the morning pumping three inches of water from a flooded basement, hauling the wet vac down and up the stairs, and when he stopped to think about Nita and Pet back here waiting on breakfast, he imagined they’d be all over themselves with tears and grief and worry. Last thing he expected was to find them whooping it up, laughing, like their ex-husband hadn’t just driven off a cliff, like there was nothing going on.
“I’ll just wash up,” he says, when they finally reach the door. He steps clear of Pet and makes for the stairs, thinking, okay, I’ll go change my clothes and catch my breath and by the time I come down she’ll have tired of this game. By the time I come down she’ll be back in the kitchen, brooding over her precious Terence, weaving her worst-case scenarios together with Anita’s to where there will no longer be room for such flirtation.
“Not so fast,” Pet says, grabbing for his shirt. She’s not finished with Nils just yet, and he can’t think quickly enough to stop her. She untucks the back of his shirt and pulls herself up the stairs toward him by its tail. He doesn’t want to appear rude or unfriendly, so he doesn’t shake her off the way he might. She throws off her robe and turns to Anita on the landing below. “Me and Nilsy,” she says, mock-sweet, “we got time for a tumble before breakfast?”
Wood needs cash and coffee. He’s down to about thirty dollars, with no place to stay and no prospects. Last night was dry and reasonably warm, and he didn’t do too badly on a bench in an unlit corner of a municipal parking lot, but he feels like shit this morning. Looks like shit, too, he imagines, although perhaps this last is not quite so unfortunate. He thinks maybe it’ll be easier to blend in if he’s not himself, if his two days growth of beard and dead skin cells leave him looking, smelling a shade more like the day laborers crowding into Two Stools’s coffee shop for their morning caffeine, and a little less like the hulking, tortured presence of an untethered movie star he had only recently been. Like shit is a good thing, probably.
“Harlan,” Two Stools greets, as Wood sits himself at one of her loose tables. Her tone is agreeable, but she’s got her head down. She’s wiping at the table with a once-wet rag from her apron belt and righting the ash tray, sugar tower, and salt and pepper shakers into a kind of arrangement at the center. Her entire upper body sways with the choreographed effort, even after she is through. She goes through these motions a hundred times each day; she’s all business, and yet Wood can find no dullness to her routine.
“Grace,” he says back.
She smiles shyly, recalling her first encounter with this unusual man. “Coffee?” she says, stepping away from the table after she’s set it right.
“Decaf?”
“No,” she says. “Coffee. My people drink it straight.”
“Coffee, then.” Actually, he can always use the caffeine, now especially.
“Black?”
Wood nods and watches as she retreats, reaches behind the counter for the coffee pot, a cup and saucer, and returns with these to his table. She carries the cup and saucer individually, each pressed flat between the flesh of one forearm and breast and not fitted together collectively the way Wood is accustomed to seeing. He notices this, thinks it strange, but it doesn’t do any more than occur to him.
“What kind of name is Harlan?” Two Stools asks, setting down the saucer and cup.
“Gaelic,” Wood guesses.
“Maybe. I don’t really know. I used to know when I was a kid.”
“Gaelic, like Celtic? Up here, we know about the Celtics.”
He’s about to be tripped up and quickly shifts to safer ground: “I’ve always thought it’s not where a name comes from that’s important, but where you take it, what you do to make it your own.” Drivel. This is what these people are good at. This is what he’ll have to learn.
Two Stools weighs Wood’s nonsense, but it proves too much for her. “I’ve never known a Harlan before,” she manages.
“Well,” Wood says, “here I am.” He twirls his right hand against the air with a flourish, as if he might take a bow the way Carson used to do in his Carnac bit.
“Only other Harlan I even heard of was Colonel Sanders,” Two Stools offers. “You know the Colonel Sanders I mean?”
This Grace, Wood’s thinking. She moves from one thing to the next and expects the world to follow. That he has strikes him as remarkable. “Colonel Sanders, the chicken guy?” he says.
“That’s the one. Colonel Harlan Sanders’s Famous Recipe Chicken.”
“He’s a Harlan?” Wood asks. This might be a good thing to know.
“Was,” Two Stools reports. “Dead now, pretty sure.”
Wood files this away, wonders how it is that the kind of woman who would retain a piece of information like this hasn’t yet shown herself to be the kind of woman who would also recognize his hulking, tortured self. Probably, she picked up this morsel on the Kentucky Fried Chicken guy from People or Entertainment Tonight—where else would she learn something like that?—and it follows that a frequent consumer of such infotainments might have come upon an item regarding Terence Wood, with accompanying photo, at one time or another. Surely, if this Grace can identify the Kentucky Fried Chicken guy by his given name, then it’s only a matter of time before she identifies the internationally famous Terence Wood. Maybe she already has. Maybe she’s seen the papers and heard the news on the radio and put it together and figured it wasn’t a big enough deal to say anything about it. Maybe she’s showing great restraint in not revealing Wood to her other customers, keeping him for herself. Maybe she’s picking her spots, working some unforseen angle. Maybe she’s some backwater Kathy Bates, stalking him, planning to inflict unspeakable miseries on his presumed dead body, deep fry his body parts and serve him up in a red and white bucket.
She disappears for a bit and returns with what appears to Wood to be a plate of corned beef hash. Where it comes from, he’s got no idea. Doesn’t seem to Wood she had time to slip back into the kitchen to pick up an order, but here it is, and it looks to be heading his way. This must be considered. Last time Wood ate hash was from a vacuum-packed tin on maneuvers, and the idea of interacting with Two Stools’s version is perhaps more than his uneasy stomach can manage. Still, he does not want to appear rude or suspect, so he prepares himself for a couple polite mouthfuls. Better to accept her good will, he overthinks, than to send it back untouched.
“Look here, sailor,” Grace announces, laying the plate before Wood with importance. “Jimmy over there said he wasn’t much for hash this morning.” She flits her eyes across the room to indicate an oily little man with someone else’s name stitched over the pocket of his mechanic’s overalls. “Said he’d rather just have a bowl of oatmeal. H’only took but a few bites. Shame to waste it.”
Wood doesn’t catch Two Stools’s meaning straight off, and when he does, he is thrown: she means for him to finish this oily man’s breakfast. This is what he looks like to her, a man who might welcome a hardly touched plate of used hash. This is what he has become overnight, and the realization leaves him pleased, uncertain, disoriented. He gets a thick noseful of the gestured food and it mixes with the idea of where it’s been to leave Wood feeling queasy—happy at the ease of his transformation and yet unsure of his ability to walk about in his new role.
“Coffee’s about all I can manage,” he says kindly, inching the plate from his range of smell.
“Suit yourself,” Grace sings back, and she collects the hash and reconnoiters with it to an already-started plate of same, two tables over, apparently occupied by a diner with less discriminating tastes. She slops the hash from one plate to the next without a word. She doesn’t even step back to notice her breakfasting customer—a large, also-oily, also-overalled man, who receives the extra helping as if he has it coming, as if everyone around here eats from the same pot like it’s nothing at all.
This, Wood thinks, might take some getting used to.
Here’s Norman: half-orphaned, half-paying attention, halfway home to deal with his mother, this guy she married, Pet, every damn thing. Woodman. This right here’s the hard part.
It’s like it’s not real. Half real. Half assed and half real. The way Norman heard, what he heard, what he knows, it’s all like something out of one of Woodman’s movies. It’s happened, it’s scripted, but it’s not yet finished. He’s been redirected, his whole life set off course, but then there’s this gaping loophole, another way around. His father’s dead, but maybe not. He smirks at his own melodrama, but he is held by it, taken. Poor Norman’s been ripped apart and left hanging, half orphaned, but maybe not. Better: quarter-orphaned. Still, he’s more orphan than not. He considers the phrase. Movie title, he thinks. More Orphan Than Not. Something he can use.
The loaner he’s driving lost its radio to an unfortunate piece of parking a couple weekends ago on Riverside Drive, so Norman’s got the headphones on full tilt: “It’s a Sunshine Day” retooled by some industrial band. His roommate’s tape. He remembers the song from a Brady Bunch episode and wonders what it’s doing now in his ears. Everybody’s laughing. Sunshine day-ay-ay. Everybody’s smiling. Sunshine day-ay-ay.
Maybe in 1973, he thinks. Now’s another story.
Norman ramps onto the Massachusetts Turnpike underneath a helmet of grunge-kitsch. He’s got the windows down, the sunroof cracked, but the traffic sounds don’t reach through the headphones. He’s cocooned himself from whatever else is going on, denied to the rest of the world, like he’s driving in one of those boothed arcade games: Killer Grand Prix. If he drifts from his lane, he’ll never hear the bleat of horn to scare him back in line.
He’s in his own head, a straight shot into Boston. Nothing to distract him, but, at the same time, there’s nothing to keep him focused, rooted. His thoughts bounce from school to home, friends to family, from the picture he was deconstructing before he heard to this right here, right now. There’s The Godfather and the destruction of the American family, and there’s the Woodman and the destruction of his. There’s nothing to hold him to the moment, but this doesn’t register as a concern, at least not on any conscious level, and certainly not at first. Anyway, it’s not like the road twists and turns all that much. What the hell is there to pay attention to anyway? He can watch The Godfather and still drive this road. There’s a slight curl off the Pike onto Interstate 93, north to New Hampshire, but that’s it. If he keeps his eyes between the lines, dead ahead, he should do just fine.
To Norman—unfocused, driving—the Mass Pike has got to be one of the most boring stretches of asphalt ever committed to high-speed, intrastate travel. Absolutely. In truth, there are sparkling lakes, lush valleys, and here and there, pockets of great natural beauty, but to Norman the road just unravels and keeps going and going. The only dots on the landscape are the rest stops and food courts that reappear before it even occurs to him to eat, or piss, or stretch his legs. It’s like his needs have been programmed into the road. Also, it’s like one long strip mall with no good stores. It’s like a lot of things, he thinks, and, at the same time, like nothing at all. Even the songs blasting through his head are no distraction. What the hell kind of songs are these, he wonders. Who programmed this fucker? He’s way up on the volume, but he’s not truly listening. He keeps flashing back on images of his father: speedboating in Cannes, high-rolling in Vegas, limelighting in Hollywood, uncoiling in one of his ridiculous fucking cabins. . . . Stills from a long life lived someplace else.
They are everywhere for Norman, these images. Everywhere and in no one place. Here’s one: long time ago, on vacation in Sun Valley, Idaho, his father ditched a perfectly good snowmobile into a perfectly passable gully. He wanted to see how long it would take rescuers to track down his missing self and wanted to impart to Norman his strange values of patience and place and purpose. For several hours, father and son sat huddled against the cold in a crude snow bank, awaiting salvation, weighing the mysteries of the peculiar lives they shared. The picture reforms in Norman’s racing head as if it never left. He was only ten or twelve, too young to be placed into such danger or introspection, but it’s all here for him still: the fleeting closeness with his father, the taste of the old man’s breath bouncing off the packed snow, the strangely adolescent notion that through Terence Wood’s eyes the world must seem a sorry fucking place.
He does not remember being afraid.
“Bad for business, them to let us freeze to death,” Woodman told his only child, presumably in reassurance. The words reached Norman’s nose before they found his ears. “You’ll see.”
And he did. The sun didn’t set on the valley before the father proved his labored point to his young son, the boy he saddled with the eery-queery name of Anthony Perkins’s Psycho character years after it mattered that Wood had lost the part. When mountain patrol workers arrived breathlessly on the scene, the actor was appropriately stoic. It never occurred to Norman to reveal the purposefulness of the incident to rescuers, to his mother (God, she would have just shit!), to any of the dozen reporters who had gathered at the Idaho hospital where father and son were choppered and treated for frostbite, and it was never again discussed. There were the requisite mentions on Entertainment Tonight, CNN, and a two-page spread (with “exclusive photos”) in People, but the incident was pushed from public attention by a staged reconciliation between Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and a flare-up at a gala Holmby Hills picnic for the preservation of the rainforests, during which the actress Blythe Danner would not accept that the organizer’s choice blend of Brazilian coffee was being served and warmed in nonrecyclable styrofoam cups. There followed, respectively, a flap and a scene, and after such as these, the news of a celebrity snowmobiling mishap seemed a trifle, even if it seemed to Norman Wood the largest, most defining fucking moment of his young life. In the movie he keeps in his head, this was a key scene.
Still, it happened and it was over. To talk about it would have been to put his father on the defensive, to question the precepts he had put on display. It occurs to him now, naturally, because of the similarity to yesterday’s accident. He imagines the headline: GAS-POWERED VEHICLE DROPS FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH, but also because of the manner in which it reveals his father: impetuous, impervious, self-important.
Now that Norman Wood’s put his unfocused head to it, virtually every memory of his father reveals similar aspects of character. There was that time, this is going back now, when the Woodman went on the Carson show to endorse independent presidential candidate John Anderson and wound up referring to Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter as “a couple dumb fucks.” (Norman’s seen the tape, with Carson’s classic doubletake, the censor’s transparent bleep; it made the anniversary show, couple years running.) Or, just this past summer, when he called a press conference to announce his application for the post of Commissioner of Major League Baseball. (Come to think of it, what the hell was that all about?) Or, when the maitre’d at Lutece wouldn’t seat him without a reservation, no matter who he was, and the old man simply walked to an empty, not-bussed table and sat himself down, without reservation, at a table next to Liz Smith, who made dutiful note of the incident in her next column.
And even this. This business with the car over the cliff, the body missing, the terror of not knowing what happened, the raging doubt surrounding his father’s last moments, if they were indeed his last moments . . . it all seems to Norman like a part of the same package. It is all just the Woodman, as ever, on his own kick, manipulating his world to his own rhythms, having his way.
Tollbooth guy, just off Route 128 outside Boston: “No pennies.”
Norman, who had counted out the toll with what change he had: “Why not?”
“Read the sign.”
Norman reads the sign: No Pennies. Okay, he thinks, so now we can all read. “Okay,” he tries, lifting the headphones from their perch and sliding them down around his neck like a collar, “but why not? Maybe they screw up the machines or something, but this is the full-service lane, right?”
“Sign’s not there for my health.”
To Norman, this seems an arbitrary nuisance. He holds out his coins, palm up, sixty-five cents. Exact change. “Either you want my money, or you don’t,” he says.
Tollbooth guy looks back at Norman from inside his own bad day. Norman sees that he’s got his tiny workstation decorated with pictures of Selena and Jesus, the slain Latin singer and the crucified son of God. Funny how Norman’d never heard of Selena while she was alive. And funnier how he’d been raised to think he, Norman, was the son of God, crucified by his very birth and the burdens that came with it. Lately, before he heard, he tried not to think about his father, to place himself in some unvarnished context, but these last couple hours, he can’t lose the old man. A part of Norman believes his father is in the car with him, spiriting him through these next paces, telling him what to do.
A fruity-smelling stick of incense, not unpleasant, burns alongside the cash register inside the tollbooth. Gloria Estefan is scratching her way from a Tandy transistor radio hanging from a hook on the far wall. “Turn the Beat Around.” Tollbooth guy’s got a sterling silver cross dangling from his left ear, a jail-green tattooed serpent slithering from his right shirt-sleeve. He flashes a gold-toothed, fume-sucking smile that tells Norman he’s up for the hassle. “I could write you up for the headphones alone,” he says, reaching toward the incense for an official-looking pad. “Take down your plates, send you out a nice fucking summons.”
“You want my money or not?” Norman says back, palm still open.
“I’m tellin’ you, kid. Bust my hump and I’ll bust yours.”
At this, Norman turns his open palm over and lets the coins drop to the pavement. Some of the coins are stuck to his sweaty skin, and these he scratches off with the fingers of his other hand. “Don’t bother counting it,” he says in his best Woodman impression. “It’s all there.” Then he stomps on his roommate’s gas pedal and speeds from the toll plaza, itching for a chase. The car doesn’t respond the way he’d like it to—it goes zero to sixty in a time no one would advertise—but it does the job, and, as he pulls away, Norman thinks he doesn’t have to put up with this shit. Nobody should have to put up with this shit. Not someone who is more like his father than he knows.
Phone.
It takes Pimletz a half-dozen rings before he realizes it’s his own line and not Hamlin’s. It’s not like anyone ever calls, not unless he’s left a message and is waiting to hear back. On his voice mail, he tells people he’s either away from his desk or on another call, but he’s never had to use the damn thing. He’s hardly away from his desk, and he’s rarely on another call. If he leaves a message for a coroner or a funeral home director or a grieving family member, he waits around until he hears back. It’s been two years since the paper spruced up its phone system, and he’s never even bothered to consult the memo the office services people sent around telling how to use it. It’s not that he doesn’t trust the technology; he doesn’t trust people to make themselves available to him a second time.
“Pimletz,” he barks into the handset, the way he’s heard Hamlin bark his own name forty-three times already today. And it’s not even lunch.
“Axel Pimletz?” he hears back. “Obit desk?”
No, he wants to say. Axel Pimletz, tax attorney. Synchronized swimmer. Horticulturist. Systems operator. Instead, he says, “This is he.” What the hell kind of way is that to talk? He scolds himself, soon as he’s said it. This is he.
Guy on the other end introduces himself as Warren Stemble, senior editor at Asterisk Books in Manhattan. “You may have heard of us,” he says to Pimletz, coaxing at recognition. “We’ve had quite a lot of ink these past months.”
“I know the name,” Pimletz concedes. He’s thinking, I thought Asterisk was a magazine. He’s thinking, books and magazines, they’re becoming the same thing.
“Good. That makes what I have to say that much easier. I find it awkward having to introduce myself. I never know where to start. Don’t you find that, Mr. Pimletz?”
For a guy so concerned about making what he has to say that much easier, this Warren Stemble doesn’t seem to Pimletz to be in any great hurry to reach his point. “No,” Pimletz says, “not really.” He’s got his own introduction down to where it doesn’t mean a thing.
“Fine,” Stemble follows. “Good. Well, then, here it is. I have a proposition for you.”
“I’m listening.”
“As you may know, my company owns world rights to Terence Wood’s life story. He was at work on the manuscript at the time of his accident. We’ve seen only a few pages, but what we’ve seen is brilliant. Just brilliant. But that’s Terence Wood for you, right?” He gets back nothing, continues. “I understand there are notes to be found among his papers and hours of unedited interviews on tape. Hopefully, somewhere, there’s another few hundred pages of manuscript, possibly an outline of some sort. It had been our plan to publish Mr. Wood’s autobiography late next year, but, in consideration of yesterday’s tragedy, we would like to come out with it sooner.”
“And?” Pimletz wouldn’t recognize a proposition if it breathed hotly in his ear.
“And, naturally, we need a writer, someone to pull all the loose ends together. It must seem ghoulish, I know, for me to be on the phone to you the very next day, but you understand that time is of the essence.”
Pimletz’s first thought, also naturally, is that this polished, big time book editor, with his polished, big time moniker, is merely seeking a recommendation, a couple names from the Record-Transcript rank and file to start him on his search, maybe a confirming vote of approval. But then it hits him. It’s not the rank and file this guy wants, just the rank.
“Me?” he checks. “Why me?”
“Don’t be modest, Mr. Pimletz,” Stemble pushes. “We saw the obituary in this morning’s paper. Your paper. Front page, no less. Guy who writes like that should be writing for us.”
Pimletz does not wish to argue the point, but he can’t help himself. “Yes, but, still. . . .” He lets his mini-protestation hang, hoping Warren Stemble will be kind enough to upend his thought, or to keep him from having to finish it himself, but when there is no help forth-coming, he attempts a kind of follow-through: “There are, like, what, a million writers in New York? Another million out in L.A.?”
“Give or take,” Warren Stemble agrees, “but how many up in Boston?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “You’re New England. Terence Wood is New England. Christ, you live in his hometown.”
I do, Pimletz wants to say. Then he’s thinking, okay, I’m in the right place, but I’m also cheap. And available. He’s thinking, it’s not yet noon, but probably these Asterisk assholes have called every other hack who knows how to type and come up with shit. Probably, I’m a last resort dressed up to look like first choice. “What you read was a clip job,” Pimletz says, damning his chances.
“And a fine clip job it was, Mr. Pimletz.”
Jesus, this guy won’t go away.
“Look, Axel,” Warren Stemble says, “if I may call you Axel. I know how newspapers work. I know what you do. I did it myself for a time. I know that if you’re like most writers, if you’re like me, you have time on your hands. I know you can do this shit sleeping, and that you’d probably not like to be doing it for the rest of your life.” Beat. “You’ll let me know if I’m getting warm?”
“Go on.”
“I also know that you’re probably making, say, fifty-five thousand a year? Sixty, tops?”
“Warm.”
“There’s money to be made here, Axel,” Warren Stemble says. “Good money. For all of us. For Wood’s family, too, if that’s a concern.”
“How much?” Pimletz asks. “What are we talking about?” This he has to know.
There’s a town square, just outside Bar Harbor, actually looks more like a town parallelogram. What it is, basically, is a small, unevenly shaped patch of grass dropped into the middle of one of the busier intersections, making itself a much-angled rotary and the center of attention. On it, there’s a bench and a plaque and a flagpole and two dormant flowerbeds.
He crosses onto the green without thinking about it, although perhaps he should. The center of attention is the last place a guy like Wood ought to be right now, and yet here he is, sunning his famous face on the most prominent bench in town, awash in the harsh glint of midday sun. He’s got the place pretty much to himself, save for a couple terns. Or maybe seagulls. He’s never been any good with birds. One thing he knows is they’re not pigeons. Pigeons, he knows. Egrets, he thinks. They could be egrets.
He’s got a Free! Take One! local newspaper tucked under his arm—Acadia Week—but he hasn’t cracked it yet. He’s figuring how to access his trapped, once-considerable funds, without giving himself away. This is both a nagging concern and a daunting puzzle. He might have thought of this beforehand, would have made things a whole lot easier, but his instincts did not anticipate any great need for financial planning. All he wanted was out, and there’s no way back in without money.
Until yesterday, money was always one of the last things on his mind. There was someone to pay to think about his money for him. Now, he thinks of little else but what’s left in his pockets, and from there it’s a short trip to what he might find in the Acadia Week classifieds. In his head, he runs through the kinds of jobs he can handle, if it comes to that: he can paint houses, inside and out, if someone shows him how; he can lift things, heavy things, long as he doesn’t have to navigate any stairs; he can trap lobsters, cut grass, clean toilets, read the news on the radio; hell, he can middle-manage, if he can find a local businessman fool enough to give him a shot.
Ah. He can also steal. Yes. This he’s already done, at least in theory, for a time in rehearsal. Yes, this he can do, and here’s why: early ’70s, he was signed for the lead in a picture called Harry in Your Pocket, one of those benign caper comedies that were, for some reason, popular at the time. In the interest of verisimilitude (which was also, for some reason, popular at the time), he studied for weeks with a master pickpocket named Snake, a crappy little accountant from Nutley, New Jersey. Snake happened to discover his particular gift of dexterity when he abandoned his sleeping first wife on an Amtrak train headed for Virginia Beach. Snake, then known as Bernie, hopped off in Philadelphia after pinching two thousand dollars in travelers’ checks and a complete set of credit cards from the inside zippered pocket of a baby blue rain slicker, which his sleeping first wife happened to have bunched up and put to use as a pillow to cushion her head against the hard window. Not bad, Bernie the Snake thought at the time, and for some years after. Guy landed in Vegas and made a quick name for himself. Regrettably, Wood was such a dedicated pupil and committed actor that he started to put his new pickpocketing skills to full use. After all, he justified, where was the challenge in lifting a wallet from a hanging suit of clothes when there was the real deal to consider? He wound up making his own name for himself, caught red-fingered on a casino video monitor, working his craft on an old man in a fishing hat who appeared to be from somewhere in Missouri. It made all the papers, and, in the fallout, Wood lost the part to James Coburn, a tough sonofabitch whose fingers were nowhere near as light, but who came without the excess baggage of a Nevada police record and a fucking file cabinet, legal, full of bad publicity.
So, anyway, he can steal. Definitely. Or, at least, borrow. Shouldn’t be too hard to get the touch back in his fingers. Then, he’ll set himself up, find a way to get the pinched wallet back to the duped tourist, make good on the monies, eventually. He doesn’t have the head for outright thievery. There’s a way to live with what he has to do, he thinks, if this is what he has to do. Can’t go pinching from one of the locals, that would be like shitting on his new front lawn, but there’re enough out-of-towners to get him going: just line the suckers up and pluck ’em off, one by one. No big thing.
Wood’s got his scheming head tilted so far toward the other side of the law that he doesn’t notice the short-legged, short-tempered police officer step onto his patch of grass and make a not-so-tentative approach. The cop kicks at Wood’s bench with a scuffed black shoe, the heel of which has worn thin in such a way as to suggest a pronation problem. “All right,” the police officer says, in a tiny bark, “move it along.”
Wood, with guilty conscience, worries that the police officer has somehow read his mind, wants to pick him up on premeditation charges. He can’t think of a thing to say in his own defense.
“Don’t want no trouble here,” the officer keeps at him. “Move it along.” He waves his billy club at Wood like a paintbrush, back and forth to where he just might black out the whole scene.
Reflexively, Wood lifts himself from the bench, but then he sets himself back down, reconsidering. This, too, is reflexive, but it takes a while for it to kick in. He’s not breaking any laws here, Wood quickly realizes. It’s not a crime merely to ponder an illegal act. Hey! Far as the law knows, Wood’s just a guy killing time on a public bench, minding his own. Who is this squat little man with bad shoes and a possible pronation problem to try to move me along? Where does he get off? Cop doesn’t know who he’s dealing with, Wood thinks. I’ll move myself along when I damn fucking feel like it. A part of him wants to bark back at the officer in the same brusque tone, but he is checked by common sense. He crosses his legs, clasps his hands behind his head, leans back and says, “Friend, I’m in no particular hurry.”
This, he believes, is an appropriate response.
The badly shoed police officer, believing otherwise, slaps the billy club in the pit of his own left arm and reaches for his holster with his freed right hand. He wants to be ready. Last time he met up with some belligerent psycho, the fucker nearly tore his head off. This guy looks big enough to give him trouble. He wonders what the lunar cycle is looking like these days. Usually, he doesn’t pay attention, but he read somewhere that these assholes get going all kinds of weird when there’s a full moon. He’s careful to tread lightly here, doesn’t want to set this guy off, not without back-up.
Wood sees he’s got the cop all bent with worry, and he plays to it. “Friend,” he says, “I’m thinking Boggs gets into the Hall on the first ballot.”
Norman pulls his borrowed wheels into the parking lot of a package store just outside Nashua. It’s not a grand plan, but the idea and the store present themselves at roughly the same time and seem to get along. No way he can face what’s going on in his mother’s house without a splash of something, he is made to realize. Vodka, probably, this close to home, this early in the day. Anything else will leave him smelling tanked, when all he wants is to top himself off, dull his senses a bit before dealing with whatever the hell it is he’s going to have to deal. He certainly doesn’t want to throw any pain-in-the-ass questions or recriminating stares into the mix.
There’s a poster out in front of the package store advertising a new line of flavored vodkas—citrus, currant, pepper—and Norman is drawn by the bright colors and the promise of refreshing sweetness, escape, a life without worry. (Good things, all.) Inside, there’s a display of, like, a dozen flavors, all spread out as if in a spice rack, and it strikes Norman that even this last, urgent need has been thought out for him, programmed into the road home. He lifts a few of the flat, four-ounce flasks and, for some reason, brings them to his nose one by one, thinking this will help him decide. The smells of glass and label and plastic seal are inter-changeable, but he is pushed to choose a citrus for now and a cherry for later.
Good, he’s thinking, walking his bottles to the counter. This will be good. He grabs a couple swizzle-stick straws from a plastic container and fits them in his pocket with the change. Something to chew on.
Back in the car, he twists the seal from the citrus-flavored bottle, brings it to his lips, and right away realizes that the notion of flavored vodkas is probably something better left to brightly colored posters than to his own circumstance. What stands out is more of an aftertaste, really. Nothing too terrible, but nothing too terrific. And nothing that’s exactly alive with flavor, either. A couple sips later, and he starts to think maybe it’s his situation that leaves the vodka tasting flat. Surely, this is not the way flavored vodkas are meant to be consumed: alone, in the middle of the day, in a borrowed car idling outside a state-owned package store. Surely, he fits into some demographic the marketing people hadn’t anticipated.
Norman, anxious to turn his situation around, fishes in his pockets for one of his tiny straws, thinking maybe the citrus flavoring will have a better chance of locating his buds through a small sip than through a full-throated gulp, only the straw is too short to stand in the flask and too narrow for any significant sipping. Still, he’s determined to complete his experiment, and he pinches at the straw with the fingers of his right hand while tipping the flask gently with his left so that it might find vodka. This proves more trouble than it’s worth, so Norman places the wet straw on the dash and downs the rest of his four ounces in a single swig.
Gulped, the vodka tastes faintly antiseptic, almost like cleaning fluid, like what he imagines Lemon Fresh Mr. Clean must taste, and the alcohol buzzes through Norman’s head like it belongs to someone else. (The head, he means, and not necessarily the vodka.) Also, it’s like the static on a still-warm television screen. These are the connections he makes. It’s there, this buzz, but not so anyone would notice, except maybe to the touch, timed right. It’s there and it’s like cleaning fluid, a little.
He tries to shake the buzz from his head, almost in a shiver, returns the headphones to his ears, and pulls from the parking lot like Starsky and Hutch. This connection, too, just comes to him, peeling from the lot, and now that it has, he’s all over it. Starsky and Hutch. Damn. He’s got their lunchbox, still, in one of Woodman’s houses somewhere, unless maybe his mother or the fucking Swede threw it out. Only now that he’s onto it, he realizes that even if he’s still got the lunchbox, that whole Starsky and Hutch deal’s been wrecked by what’s happened to that guy’s family. Starsky, or Hutch, he never could tell them apart. One of them. Guy’s wife got AIDS in a blood transfusion and passed it to her kids, and pretty soon he’s the only one left. That’s the story as it registered for Norman, and now that he’s landed on it the sadness of what’s happened to Starsky and Hutch overcomes him and becomes greater than his own. Strange how the tragedies of other people seem larger to Norman than those in his own life. After all, he’s also the only one left. His father’s gone and driven himself off some cliff, his mother’s gone and married the Swede. There’s just him, alone, headed north in a borrowed car to a house that is so unfamiliar he must consult directions.
He starts to cry, only in his head the tears are for Starsky and Hutch. And it’s more than just tears. Stuff comes out his nose, bubbles form at his mouth when his lips part, his face is suddenly slick with sadness. It passes over him in a moment, this cry, but even in the calm, he is left whimpering. Wet and whimpering. He pulls over to the side of the road and dabs at his face with his sleeve, rubs at his eyes with the butts of his palms, checks himself in the rearview mirror, wishes for tissues.
He reaches over to roll down the passenger window, and then back to roll down his own. He wants to get a breeze going, figures maybe somewhere in the whoosh of speeding, mid-afternoon air he’ll find a way to blowdry the tears and slobber from his face, the red from around his eyes, the ambiguous ache from his heart. He figures on these things—counts on them, really—only, when he gets going again, he finds the manufactured breeze too much of a distraction. Out of nowhere, it’s like a twister inside the car. Toll receipts are lifted from the dash by the cross currents; the pages of this morning’s Daily News are rifled in the back. For a moment, he imagines his father in the back seat, flipping through the newspaper to measure the coverage, searching so frantically for his obituary that it might be another bad review of another bad picture.
In the whoosh, Norman remembers a car his father used to drive, some kind of convertible, cherry red. He remembers the way the Woodman would pull up at Anita’s with the top down, whatever the temperature. He’d tool around L.A. on his occasional weekends with Norman with the heater on full. “Don’t want to hear your crap, son,” the old man dismissed, whenever Norman complained about the cold. “In this town, you put up with a lot. This is nothing.”
Soon, Norman is off I-93 and scrambling for directions. He wrote them down on the back of a Tower Records receipt, only the tiny square seems to have been blown from the shelf beneath the handbrake. He can’t recall whether to turn east or west at the stop sign, but decides to go from memory. It’d be no big deal to pull over and fish around for the receipt, but this seems easier to Norman, more practical. It’s not like he’s never driven here or anything.
And so he follows the scent home, ticking off the familiar landmarks as they pass: Dairy Queen, Stop ’n’ Shop, BayBank, the pond where he would’ve learned to play ice hockey had he grown up here and shared the local passion for the sport. As it is, he can’t even skate. As it is, he’s only spent a half-dozen nights on his mother’s couch.
There, just around the bend, across from the school, he can see Nils’s pickup in the carport, a rental job out front. Must be Pet’s. Must be everyone is inside, finishing lunch, waiting on word. Waiting on him.
Waiting.
He pulls up along the curb in front of the house, a couple car lengths back from where he would park if he felt like he belonged. He checks himself in the rearview, runs his fingers through his hair, makes himself presentable.
They’re out to meet him before Norman’s exited the car: his mother, Pet, even Nils. A regular fucking welcome wagon. All he needs.
“Oh, baby,” his mother says, reaching him first, collecting Norman, tight, in her long arms. She grabs onto him like there’s nothing else left.
Nils pats Norman tentatively on the back, not sure he belongs inside the hug with the boy, but wanting to make some physical connection.
Pet steps back from the car and onto the sidewalk, choosing to leave the moment alone before inserting herself into it. A part of her wants to turn away from it. Poor Norman looks so much like those old publicity shots of her Wood that it hurts to see him. Kills. There’s this thing they each do with their face, a kind of flared-nostril, curled-lip snarl Pet had mostly seen on Wood during orgasm, which now appears on Norman. She never noticed the similarity before. She likes to think it is every emotion, all at once, bursting from wherever it can find expression, and she takes it in wondering what Norman is trying to keep inside.
Norman loses himself in his mother’s fierce hug. He gives himself completely to it. He doesn’t mean to, at first, but he can’t help himself. Soon, he’s not even thinking about it. In the folds of her robe and the smell of her same perfume, he is a small child again. His knees buckle. He seems suddenly unable to support his own weight. He starts to weep uncontrollably, and it is only through the sounds of his own sobbing that he becomes self-conscious again, aware of his letting go. “Daddy,” he cries out, trying to fight back the hard flow of tears.
“It’s all right, baby,” Anita says, stroking her son’s hair, working to keep him from collapsing right there on the street. Holding him—indeed, lifting him, almost—she starts to think of Ray Bolger. She’s inside the moment, but also on its edges, thinking of Ray Bolger. Yes, Norman’s gone all limp like a scarecrow, and, for a moment, she fights the impulse to look around the yard for extra stuffing. That’s the way things are these days with Anita. Even now. She’s either not all here, or too much here, or someplace else. But then she’s back to it, instinctively, finding the right way to hold her grown son, and soon she’s rocking gently with him, almost in a dance, back and forth on the curb in front of her house. She hums a tune neither one of them recognizes and no one else can hear.
“It’s gonna be all right, baby,” she whispers sweetly into his ear. “Everything’s gonna be all right.”
Pet steps to Nils and wraps a robed arm around his skinny shoulders. She’s not flirting, or goofing, or anything at all. She just wants something to hold onto, and Nils is in easy reach. He’ll do, she thinks, and then she wonders if maybe her knees might buckle and her friend’s husband will have to struggle to support her weight.
Nils wonders the same, realizes this reaching out of Pet’s is not the same as her earlier playfulness. This reaching out is real, but it makes him uncomfortable. He wills himself tall against it. He does it for Anita, and for the boy.
This, all of this . . . this is not what any of them were expecting.