Checker and the Derailleurs

“And where can we find him?”

  “The r-river.”

  “In the river, or out?”

  “Out.”

  “And where along the river?”

  “In R-r-rah—Rah—”

  She stroked over his forehead and crown and set a subtle low vibration into the air that only Carl could hear, the very bottom end of the octave now, the pedal depressed.

  “Ralph DeMarco, north of Hell Gate,” he told Syria with perfect fluidity.

  “And has anyone called an ambulance?”

  “I—I did,” said Carl, and the shy pride with which he told her this was quickly overtaken by the memory itself, dialing and stuttering horribly to strangers, listening to their exasperation, the way they kept trying to finish his sentences for him wrong and he’d have to say, “N-n-n-n-no” trying to give them the right address until he had to put in a second quarter; but that memory was swallowed by still another, the reason for the call, and Carl began to cry. Syria held him and hugged him hard and kissed him on the forehead and then said, “Bye.”

  The crusty Levi’s crackled down Ditmars and vaulted the plum-colored railings of Ralph DeMarco, to the knoll where Checker Secretti was laid out on the grass like a piece of kelp.

  Leaning over him, Howard was soaked and barefoot, his shirt plastered to his sunburn; his expression was of an intensity rare for Howard the worrier, the analyzer, the imitator. But then, Howard was in a flow state. Howard had little endorphins wriggling all through his body.

  Howard was busy dredging up his Red Cross training, realizing that he’d never quite understood what the instruction “Clear the throat of foreign material” was referring to. It is a desperate experience to try to remember what you were taught two years ago while most of the class joked about artificially respirating some girls on the other side of the pool. Howard had already earned his Lifesaving certificate, and it was hardly fair to have to retake the test two years after the course was over.

  Yet the human mind retains everything somewhere, and coughs up what it has to when the test is for more than convincing your mother you did something productive with your summer vacation; Checker was getting oxygen somehow. When Syria pulled him away, Howard resisted at first, not realizing she simply wanted to relieve him.

  It wasn’t a relief, actually; it’s a lot easier to act in these situations than to watch, as the others also discovered when they screeched up in Caldwell’s van, hurrying to—stand there. They could only pace and memorize the bizarre picture in front of them—Syria stooped over their friend with her hair spidering everywhere, and Checker Secretti sprawled as the heretic exemplar of his own religion, everything he despised: inert, stoic, humorless. Looming overhead, Hell Gate was only metal now, and mute; Ralph DeMarco belonged to the Park Commission—Checker himself didn’t even own a laundromat. Color had fled its greatest fan; his fingers splayed fat and bleached over the grass like plump veal sausages. His lips showed more hue than the rest of him, but ice blue. The All Stars burbled in dingy brown water:

  It’s the Checker time-chucking venture,

  The end of adventure;

  Striker’s right, you’re a dumb SOB.

  You spend your life in the drink

  Like time at the sink—

  You don’t even get the ennui.

  There was a moment as the ambulance screamed around the corner that Syria leaned over him and didn’t rise again to take her own breath; the shade of his lips beneath hers warmed subtly from ice to cobalt, a richer, livelier blue. She let go of his nose, and instead put her hands behind his neck. Howard thought there was something wrong and started forward, but Caldwell restrained him.

  “She’s kissing him, stupid,” muttered Caldwell. “He’s breathing.”

  Checker’s pudgy white arm reached up and clung to Syria’s shoulder. Even the paramedics waited a respectful moment or so before lifting him onto a stretcher and slipping him in the back of the ambulance.

  24 / Comfortably Numb

  When Rachel rang the doorbell Eaton had been practicing in his living room, though he was grateful for the interruption. His own drums had turned against him. The bass was flat. The cymbals waffled and glared in the speckled sun, hitting weird harmonics that hurt his ears. He’d been playing along with “Fresh Cream,” which usually gave him satisfaction, since he considered himself so much better than Ginger Baker, but this afternoon he couldn’t seem to get through a whole song.

  Eaton’s drum set was clear Lucite. It was expensive and stylish, but in his nightmares the shells would disappear. The hardware would float over the floor. When he struck the heads, his sticks would pass through the rims and make no sound at all.

  His mother ushered Rachel in and shot Eaton a hopeful, complicitous smile before padding away. It was about time. Her son had been popular with girls since he was fourteen, yet despite his pervasive distractedness and secrecy, not a single female had phoned this whole last year.

  Rachel advanced cautiously onto the ivory carpet, worrying about dirt on her shoes. The whole living room should have been wrapped in plastic. Except for the brown pressboard that protected the feet of Eaton’s drum set from making indentations in the rug, every appointment was white or chrome. The wallpaper was expensive woven bamboo, the kind that looks delightful in a decorator’s sample book and crushingly bland on the wall. Amid the glass and alabaster, sumi prints and kokeshi dolls gave the apartment an arbitrarily Oriental air.

  “Has your mother been to the Far East?” Rachel asked.

  “Sure,” said Eaton. “Bloomingdale’s. Way over on Lexington.”

  Rachel perched on the couch piping. “I’ve never been here before.”

  “I’ve never invited you.” Eaton stayed behind his traps. Rachel was surely here on a mission of reconciliation. She was one of those women who have to have everything pink. She couldn’t conceive of two people simply not liking each other.

  He was right in guessing she was nicer than the rest of the band. “The others,” she began, “didn’t think I should bother. But you were a Derailleur, for a little while. Besides, you’d hear it soon enough. I thought it was better if one of us told you.”

  Eaton looked at her hard. He had always preferred keeping his own secrets to being let in on other people’s. And he suddenly felt nervous. Rachel looked as if she desperately wanted to leave.

  “Checker—” she went on, but paused, for she could as well have rolled a land mine onto the thick white carpet. They both stared stupidly at a spot in the middle of the room, as if the name had settled there and was so heavy that it would make a dent in the rug and Eaton would get in trouble. It was no longer possible to say this word simply. No wonder Eaton had started using “Irving.” He couldn’t say “Checker” out loud anymore.

  Rachel proceeded carefully, not wanting to trip the mine, for while Eaton felt fear, Rachel saw only fury. “After we left Vesuvius,” she said breathily, “he jumped off the bridge.”

  Into this perfectly inopportune moment Eaton’s mother chose to intrude herself. She was a thin and tremulous woman, though not, as the decor might suggest, cold. The room was so immaculate because she was not daring or aggressive enough to believe she had a right to affect her environment in any way. Her own apartment cowed her; you could see by the way she tiptoed over the carpet and laid a mat under the tray, which itself was coated with a doily and piled with napkins and coasters. Even so, she glanced apologetically around the glass table, as if it could refuse her pimiento triangles, which might leave crumbs. And clearly she was terrified of her own son. “Eaton honey, I brought—”

  “Mother,” Eaton interrupted. “One of my friends has just committed suicide.”

  “My,” she said faintly, now humiliated by these silly sandwiches, attentively manicured without an edge of crust, by having remembered both regular and diet soda, since girls always appreciate that, all in the midst of this—oh dear. “I’m so sorry.”

  “No, Mother. You’re not sorry. You’ve never even met him.
You’re just saying that.”

  “For any young man, it’s tragic—”

  “How can you be all broken up when I don’t give a shit?”

  “Sweetheart, you can’t say that—”

  “I just did.”

  Rachel had been about to explain that Eaton had misunderstood, but was so fascinated and appalled that for now she kept quiet.

  “Women,” Eaton continued, looking at both of them. “You people have to have everything sanitized, don’t you? All pretty. It’s boring. Suicide? I’m not even surprised. He was weak. I tried to tell you that. Weak,” Eaton repeated, convinced his voice was not making enough noise. In fact, it had grown rather thin. So had the Cream record, still playing; not only did it sound quieter, but as if someone had turned the bass to zero and the tenor to MAX—“White Room” whined like a faraway tree saw. And the whole apartment now seemed temporary somehow. Like a set. The walls looked hastily propped up, and Eaton was no longer convinced there was a larger building outside them. Everything seemed fake. The couch looked slipcovered, though he knew it was upholstered; the chrome looked like paint. Worst of all, when he stared down at his drum set the hardware began to float in its pool of Lucite, just as in his dreams. He reached out surreptitiously and touched the snare, finding it was there, but still not relieved. Oily sweat poured from his fingertips. Sunlight blotched his hands like liver spots.

  So no more pavid solos from the calf skins. Eaton had Astoria to himself now. He could play Plato’s every weekend. Now he could—

  He didn’t care.

  Eaton began to tremble. He held the drumstick before him and watched it shake. Dizzying apathy washed over him in waves, so that he could no longer sit up straight; his drumstick drooped to the invisible snare. In a panic he ran through topic after topic, groping for a hook. He didn’t care about Cream, The Who, Steely Dan. Rachel: he didn’t care about girls. Sandwiches: he didn’t care about food. His mother, his room. Why were they looking at him so strangely?

  “You never did understand, Rachel,” Eaton went on. “Your friend bugged me. Bugged the hell out of me. I didn’t like him.” Eaton felt the way he sometimes did in the middle of a riff when no matter how much harder he struck the head, it was never loud or climactic enough. He kept trying. “I’m glad he’s dead.”

  Rachel rose from the couch, now white as the decor. His mother looked down in apology. “Then I’m sorry to inform you that Howard pulled him out. He’s in the hospital, a little beaten up, but he’s going to be all right.”

  With a style of which Eaton would never have considered her capable, Rachel coolly picked up a pimiento sandwich and let herself out. When the door closed behind her, his mother approached Eaton on his throne, her hand gently extended in one of those moments of astonishing parental insight. She pressed his head to her breast as he pulled at her linen blouse and wept with relief.

  “Seen Check today?”

  “Yeah. Still Night of the Living Dead, man. Coulda been talking to the bedpan.”

  “When are they letting him out?”

  “Out? Sweets, they talking Bellevue.”

  “They can’t do that!”

  “Can. He booked as suicide.”

  “They don’t book you in a hospital.”

  “Might as well. Our man strapped in, you notice?”

  “How’d they know Check did it on purpose?”

  “Damnedest thing. Howard said they took one look at the kid and wrote S-U-I-C-I-D-E down on the form.”

  “I can’t figure the whole thing, Big J. If somebody asked you the one guy in your whole life who’d never jump off a bridge, who would it be?”

  So Checker had finally done the one thing that proved Check was not Check, after all. He had called his own fraud.

  If they took any satisfaction in their friend’s not being who they thought he was, they would get more.

  Howard’s afternoon with Check had been as exciting as a visit with a bowl of stewed prunes. The patient refused to eat; the regular drip of a glucose IV had begun to make Howard sleepy, and as he left the room an orderly walked beside him.

  “So Checkie made it one more time, huh? How many lives that cat got left? Three or four tops, I say.”

  “Yeah?” asked Howard warily.

  “Now, this bridge number had class. Shoulda gone out on that one.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Howard. “Excuse me, I forgot something.” Howard turned on his heel and marched back into the room of the boy whose life he had saved—one more time, it seems.

  “Check, let me see your wrist.”

  Checker obediently held out his hand.

  “No, the other one.” Looking Checker in the eye, meeting the glaucous whites head on, Howard unlaced the famous leather bracelet, angry for ever having admired it. The thong was sticky and kinked. Slipping the cuff off, Howard turned Checker’s wrist in his hands. Long white worms squirmed two and three inches up and down the veins, with a dreadful neatness, laid out carefully parallel. Up and down, not across—a deliberate and well-researched job. It was like discovering an infestation of maggots.

  Howard laced the leather back up hastily, with embarrassment, though Checker himself seemed placid enough and didn’t even watch. He was staring dully out the window.

  “So this is what you do on your days off,” said Howard hotly.

  “Not always,” said Checker, in B flat.

  “What else do you do?”

  He shrugged, barely. “Stuff. Walk around.”

  “But not so jacked.”

  The same shrug, like a twitch.

  “How many times have you tried this stunt?”

  Checker waggled several fingers.

  Howard kicked the hospital bed so that it wheeled a foot away. “Maybe that doctor’s right, they should put you away.”

  Howard stalked out of the room and headed for Plato’s.

  “Walks around? Walks around and tries to kill himself.”

  They sat at the table with their feet up, muttering “Huh” and “Son of a bitch.” They were almost disappointed. They were disappointed.

  “I like the idea of a female one hell of a lot better,” said J.K.

  “Or Check playing with a little red wagon off in the park. That’s more—”

  “Check.”

  Howard toyed with his pen clinically. “He’s a manic-depressive,” he announced, with that common terminological victory, as if to name something was to have it roped and tied.

  Since the incident by the river Howard had commanded more respect, but Caldwell couldn’t resist some of the old scorn. “Is that right?”

  “You know what that is, don’t you?”

  “I guess. He gets happy. He gets sad. So?”

  “In simple layman’s terms, that’s pretty much…” Howard enjoyed the new way they treated him, and didn’t like this familiar glare. “Well, I thought you might like to know what he is.”

  “I know what he is, thank you, and you could as well call him Georgie Porgie—”

  “Just like I know what you are?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You know. J.K. knows. They don’t know.”

  “Hey, How,” J.K. intruded. “We all pretty worked up the other night—”

  “Some of us more than others.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Caldwell softly.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Rachel.

  “Please,” said Caldwell. Rachel’s opinion of him had been growing oddly important.

  “What?” Rachel insisted.

  Howard sighed. “We played that prank, taking Check’s bike? Well, it was—stolen.”

  “Oh no!”

  While they conferred on what to do about it, Caldwell tried to think of how he could properly thank Howard later.

  “Soon Check may not be riding anything but an elevator between wards,” said Howard. “Dr. Spritzer says if Check doesn’t pull out of this autistic thing, that’s it.”

  “Hey, Hijack,” sai
d Caldwell carefully, “been to see Check yet?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you, you know. Tell him it’s okay or something. Try to snap him out of it.”

  But the boy slumped at the end of the table like bitter grounds in the bottom of a cup, and didn’t look like the kind of present you sent to the bedridden to cheer them up.

  “You take my woman, you pay.”

  Checker looked down to the knife at his throat and back up again. His expression was flat and pasty, like unrisen pizza dough.

  Rahim pressed the knife tighter, letting Checker feel its edge but still not breaking any skin. Checker raised his eyebrows and looked into the Iraqi’s eyes with the indiscriminate friendliness of the mentally retarded.

  “You don realize I come here to kill you?” In his frustration, Rahim removed the knife from Checker’s throat.

  He wiped the fingerprints off the blade with his sleeve. “Syria act like nothing wrong, you know that?…She come here often, yes?”

  Nothing.

  “And we have no rehearsal, no band. Everything fall apart because of you.” He walked over to the chrysanthemums on the bedstand and pruned some wilting blossoms with his knife. “This better. Old flower is depressing.” Rahim threw the blossoms away and brushed the petals littering the table into his hand with the blunt side of the blade. “You like food here?”

  Checker shrugged and nodded at the IV.

  “I find new recipe for bran muffin, with banana and yellow raisin? Vedy moist. You like bran muffin?”

  Rahim opened the drapes, filled the pitcher, and poured some water in the vase. He straightened the blanket at the bottom of the bed, and neatly piled the newspapers and magazines Check hadn’t been reading. All the while the Iraqi kept glancing down at his knife as if to remind himself why he’d come here, like checking a grocery list.

  The area completely straightened, Rahim turned the knife shyly in his hands. “I buy just for you. Pretty, yes? You see handle?” He showed Checker the inlaid mother-of-pearl. “I shop vedy careful. Just like you say, no such thing as ordinary day. Ordinary knife. Special knife for Sheckair. You like?”