But Joe also remembered that previous image of himself, all decked out in his winter armor on a ninety-eight-degree day, thrilling to the ping! sound as tiny spheroids bounced harmlessly off his absurdly protected body, or one of his own shots stung the next-door creep in his unprotected derriere.
“Whatever made you do a thing like that?” Joe asked. “It’s crazy. You couldn’t even have hoped to get away with it. You’re the only person in this house who owns a BB gun.”
“I know.”
“Well?”
Michael tried hard not to cry. He looked about as dolorous as dolorous can get this side of the grave, until abruptly he blurted: “Well, you two are shits! You’re stupid! I hate your guts!”
With that, he broke down, bawling. Tears rained upon the carpet, they splashed his sneakers. But, as if frozen, he remained rigid, the gun still held self-consciously at his side.
Heidi collapsed, rushing to cradle, cuddle, and murmur, “Oh hey sweet baby, don’t cry, please don’t cry, it’s all right.”
Beating back his own tears, Joe said, “Did you hear what he just called us?”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, leave him alone, Joey—haven’t you made us miserable enough for one day? Why don’t you take a hike? Go crosstown and screw your new poontang, make her kid unhappy, our children have had enough!”
How easily contrite sorrow and tender warmth could turn into blazing, maniacal rage. “All right,” Joe snapped, “that’s exactly what I’ll do, thanks for the suggestion!”
And although he could see in her eyes that she didn’t mean it, Heidi nevertheless added insult to injury by suggesting: “Why not take a suitcase? Pack some clothes so that you can stay awhile!”
Joe bolted into the bedroom, tore drawers out of his bureau and bashed them onto the floor, grabbed handfuls of underwear, socks, T-shirts, and patched dungarees, thrust them all into a laundry bag, and then, with a last agonized look at the place, he tore off his wedding ring and flung it at Heidi—it bounced off her nose and landed in the sea monkeys! Joe raged past them and out the door, did an abrupt about-face and bulled through their anguish into the bedroom, where he gathered in his glasses, his wallet, his keys, and then literally catapulted himself blindly back through the scorched doom generated by his theatrics, only to bring himself up short on the doorsill again—he no longer clutched a laundry bag in his hot little hand! Unleashing the cry of a Job, Joe plowed through the ramshackle living room yet again, embraced the bag with a bloodcurdling yell, and roared between them once more with feeling, this time for good!
He sailed down the ladder, lost his balance, and did a shoulder roll into the yard. Heidi cast open a window, crying, “I didn’t mean it, come back!”
“Go to hell!”
Flinging the laundry bag into the bed of the Green Gorilla, Joe tore open the driverside door so roughly it slammed back, almost dislocating his shoulder—he howled. Blinded by rage, ready to kill, foaming at the mouth, almost insensate, he punched the key into its slot, stamped on the starter, and the engine caught. Windshield wipers slapping time, lights on, and the radio blasting, Joe hit the gas, popped the clutch, and, in a great cloud of blue pollution, surged forward about eight feet, at which point his progress was arrested by the front grille of Ralph Kapansky’s Chevy clunker, which had just fishtailed into the yard.
Blood in his eyes! Murder in his soul! Blue smoke in his lungs! On foot again, Joe bellowed in Ralph and Gloria and Rimpoche’s direction, “Are you all right?” As soon as he heard Ralph’s whimpering reply—“I think so”—he jumped onto his bicycle and, with his chest about to burst, raining heartaches over the valley like July-fourth fireworks, he pedaled onto the open road.
“Joey, come back!” Heidi cried. No way, though. He gave her the finger, toppled into a ditch, righted himself, and thought: I’m going insane, this is crazy, I’m gonna kill myself! But somehow he regained his seat and continued along the road, utterly dumbfounded by his incredible antics and irresponsible actions. In his ears rang the imploring plaints of Heather and Michael joining their mother’s wails—“Joey, Daddy, Pop—come back!” while Ralph relentlessly honked his horn at him in execration.
* * *
HALFWAY TO TOWN, at that point where Mimsy and Tuckums exploded from their lair like fang-toothed U.S. Marines high on coke and patriotism and bent on his total destruction, Joe realized he was suddenly a man without a country. An emphatic exit, such as the one he had just pulled, prohibited any crow-eating, tail-between-the-legs, humble-pie reconciliations—at least for the foreseeable future. Essentially, he had renounced his worldly goods, his worldly woman and children, and the worldly roof over his head. This meant he had blown his prerogative to books, a telephone, food, and fatherhood. In short, as Heidi might have observed, he had severed himself from the whole shmeer.
In double short, he had bullied, shouted, adulterized, and pigheaded himself out onto the proverbial limb without a paddle.
And for what?
Joe slammed on the brakes, catching both dogs by surprise: they bumped into his rear wheel, scalping their noses. As they yelped, Joe grabbed up rocks and commenced pelting the mutts, intending to murder them outright. His first three stones missed; the fourth bounced off one dog’s head, ricocheting into the grille of a brand-new Ford pickup just as the owner of that truck, Bertram Laidlaw, the right-wing dueño of Piccolo Gas Company, exited his front door dressed to the nines for a funeral, and shouted, “What the hell are you doing?”
Suicidal, afraid of nobody—so what if he dug his own grave?… good riddance to bad rubbish!—Joe screamed:
“Your damn dogs terrorize me every time I try to ride past on my bicycle! I’m sick and tired of taking their shit! They oughtta be gassed!”
“They attacked you?” Bertram narrowed his eyes suspiciously.
“They attack me! They try to bite me! For God’s sake, man, if you can’t keep them chained up, hang them from a tree with a piece of clothesline and let them slowly strangle to death!”
“Hey, mister, don’t get a hernia.” In the same breath, directing his comments at Mimsy and Tuckums, he commanded, “C’mere, dogs!” Whereupon, those two unrelenting administrators of canine apocalypse groveled obsequiously over to their Imperial Wizard. Joe immediately wished that he’d kept his mouth shut and simply pedaled on. Instead, in reaction to his moronic tantrum, this inhuman Minuteman was going to exact revenge on his behalf.
Bertram minced a single step forward and, like a professional place-kicker attempting a forty-seven-yard field goal, he booted Tuckums at least thirty feet, past the pickup and halfway across the road, then turned sideways and punted Mimsy so hard that she most likely would have landed a mile north of town had not the foot-thick, cement-reinforced brick wall of the Laidlaw residence interrupted her forward progress as she was but two feet high and still, like a good line drive, rising.
“You lemme know if either of those two cunts ever bothers you again,” the gas man said laconically. He reentered the house, no doubt to wipe the blood off his storm-trooper cordovans.
Whimpering, Tuckums limped off the macadam as Joe hesitantly pedaled forward again. He wanted to approach the dogs and beg their forgiveness, explaining that he hadn’t known … he hadn’t meant … he couldn’t believe.… His anger had been replaced by shame and trembling. Nothing he could ever do for those poor curs would atone for the misery he had caused them. Joe could picture it all too vividly: from now on, whenever he appeared, they would scurry to a safe place. Only their eyes would follow him accusatorily. He had destroyed their verve, their love of life. He had reduced them to cowering, simpering impotency. Guilt would finally force him to locate an alternate, and no doubt twice as inconvenient, route. That way, he wouldn’t have to face the pathetic psychological wrecks that a slipshod moment of imprudence on his part had created.
* * *
WORN OUT AND thoroughly disheartened, Joe veered off the potholed dirt track bisecting the twelve-house Perry Kahn Subdivision
#4 and coasted to a weary halt beside Nancy Ryan’s VW. Sasha was seated atop the living-room couch, squeezing toothpaste against the picture window. Despite his abject disgust for himself, Joe’s heart at once commenced fibrillating excitedly, threatening a tachycardia attack. As if that weren’t enough, his trachia, bronchi, alveoli, and God knows what else in his pulmonar regions immediately reacted like a live oyster hit with lemon juice. We’re off to the suffocation derby! Joe hoarded prescription jars of both Aminodur and Terbutaline in the medicine cabinet at home, right beside his meta-proterenol inhaler. He also had cached jars of asthma pills in the glove compartments of both the Green Gorilla and the bus. Unfortunately, he carried no medical relief in his wallet (except a frayed condom left over from the eighth grade forlornly awaiting an adventure) nor in the basket of his bicycle.
“Oh dear,” he muttered lifelessly. “I’m a goner.”
Nancy’s brightly lit eyes changed their expression to one of concern. As the Doberman slithered outside, belligerently shoving its nose into Joe’s crotch, she said, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I just can’t breathe.”
Freshly laundered, her hair glistened euphorically. Her low-cut aqua-green floor-length house gown resembled an opera dress more than a bathrobe. Her milky skin had a flushed, superclean tint suggesting it would melt in his mouth if only he could catch his breath long enough to chew on it. Though obviously she could not have known of his arrival, Nancy had nevertheless dabbed a trace of perfume behind each ear, an evocative teenage scent that broke Joe’s heart, reminding him of dance cards and the popcorn aroma of old-fashioned drugstores. He might have melted right there onto the stoop, wheezing to death as he asked her to marry him, had Cheepy not zipped out the door.
Nancy said, “Oh my God, the parakeet!”
At exactly the same instant, Bradley flew out of nowhere, attacking his mom, flailing at her chest, stomach, and crotch—tears spattered all over the place. He wailed: “You let him out! You left the door open! You let him get away! You did it deliberately!”
She smacked him atop the head, saying sternly, “Don’t hit me. Go get the butterfly net.”
Bradley raced off, returning promptly with a green plastic contraption which he hurled angrily at his mother: it landed in Joe’s bewildered arms instead. Nancy strode past him, efficiently giving orders: “Quick, follow me, he always lands in Minissa’s flowerbeds.”
“Who’s Minissa?”
“Tallyrand. My next-door neighbor. Vaughn the meter reader’s wife.”
The last thing Joe saw before blindly following Nancy was an accusatory glower—call it of hatred—on the kid’s face, an expression so pure it could have stopped a pell-mell locomotive dead in its tracks.
The flowerbed, all of whose plants were solid plastic, occupied a ten-by-ten plot on the other side of Nancy’s driveway. A structure in the center of it looked suspiciously like a wooden cross. Nancy dropped to her knees at the edge of the bed, calling, “Here, Cheepy, Cheepy, Cheepy, that’s a good bird now.” And when he drew closer, Joe realized the structure was a cross. No ordinary flowerbed, this was some kind of memorial for a person who had died.
“Squat down,” Nancy said, “or you’ll frighten him away.”
“How do you know it’s a ‘him’?”
“I don’t. We just assumed he was a he.”
Perched on the cross, the bird preened its feathers. The name on the cross said: Adrian.
Joe hunched down behind her. “This isn’t a flower garden, it’s some kind of cemetery.”
“Nobody’s buried here. It’s just a little thing Minissa did in memory of Adrian.”
“Who’s Adrian?”
“She was their daughter.”
“Whaddayou mean ‘was’?”
“She died last year of leukemia, poor baby. She was only seven. And the cutest little kid on the block. If you inch forward now, real slowly, I think we can get him. Swing at him from in front, he can’t take off very well backwards. As soon as he’s in the net, slam it down on the ground so he doesn’t escape.”
“I can’t do that. What if somebody sees us? There’s enough tension in this valley without throwing a couple of clumsy jerks into the middle of somebody’s shrine to their dearly departed daughter in hopes of catching a parakeet.”
Glancing around, Joe wondered if there would be no end to the disgrace this day was bringing him. At least ten people mowed lawns, sat on their front stoops drinking beer, washed their cars, or puttered in miniature gardens. Everybody in the neighborhood was outside, nosily glancing around.
“If we don’t catch Cheepy you won’t believe the freakout that kid will pull,” Nancy said quietly. “Attila the Hun will remind you of Shirley Temple compared to that child if his bird flies away.”
Joe handed over the butterfly net. “You do it. I didn’t sign up for this gig. So far today I committed adultery, I left my wife and family, I scarred my children for life, I got hit in the face with a buzzard pie, I almost totaled Ralph Kapansky’s car, and I caused the crippling of two harmless dogs. But I’m not gonna do a nose-dive into some poor lady’s memorial garden to capture anybody’s wayward parakeet!”
She gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “I understand.”
Then, lunging forward, Nancy landed spread-eagled among the no-fade flowers, shouting triumphantly, “Got him!”
Eyes closed in humiliation, Joe wondered: Would it do any good to go door-to-door down this block, begging their forgiveness? Probably not. Slamming doors in his face, they’d order him back to his slut with her monkey paintings and the sacrilegious parakeet. On his return trip from the far end of the dirt road, suffering their taunts and blows in tragic, dignified silence, he would walk slowly—like Gary Cooper in High Noon—back to where Nancy (in the milky-white nude) awaited him with open arms. A rotten tomato would splash off his forehead; a brown banana would squish against his chest. And though small stones bruised him, he would not flinch. Even though human feces smacked against his nose, he would not lose his poise.…
“Come on.” She took his hand. “Let’s go.”
Inside the house, Sasha had finished toothpasting the living-room window and was now off in a corner, methodically shredding newspapers. Cheepy fluttered onto the earphoned head of his mollified monster-owner (who was grouchily ensconced before the color TV watching “The Beverly Hillbillies”), and started preening. Joe said, “All I want is a bath and sleep.”
He slumped on the toilet while Nancy drew a tub. Then she kneeled beside the tub, elbows resting on the porcelain, looking beautiful and sexy despite his frame of mind. The low décolletage of her silky aqua gown coyly revealed the delicate swell of one breast. Dozens of lascivious impulses were soon caught in an emotional crossfire inside his fatigued body.
“I knew you would come back tonight, Joe. All day I could feel it. It’s almost eerie. I’d swear I have a direct line to your energy. I’ve been so happy. I just know it was meant to be between us. Are you an Aquarius?”
Not long ago, Joe had decided that he would decapitate, with his lethal kung-fu fists, the next person who asked him his sign for the purpose of learning about his personality.
Nevertheless, he merely said, “No.”
“Oh?” Though taken aback, she seemed not at all surprised. In fact, her equanimity under fire amazed him. Nothing fazed this dame. Was she a Valium freak? Or on Lithium? Or Thorazine? “What is your sign?” Nancy insisted.
“‘Caution: trucks turning.’”
Her eyes sparkled as her smile spread, emitting an increasingly forceful light that soon flooded the entire bathroom. Reaching behind herself with one hand, Nancy locked the door. On her knees before him, she craned her long neck upward and kissed him with slurry lips. Joe discovered her bare breasts in his hands. She said, “Um…” He answered with a lazy, melancholic grunt. By the time she cooed, “So sweet…” he had nearly slipped into a coma of sexual arousal. While she opened his fly, Joe whimpered like an abandoned puppy
just brought in from a killing blizzard and set down on a warm hearth beside a bowl of milk. Nancy gave him the softest head he’d ever known, holding him weightlessly inside her mouth, barely massaging the tip of his penis by faintly constricting her throat. Joe slipped his fingers gently into her hair, and begged for a silky come. Catching him off guard, an “I love you” rose in his gorge; only at the last second did he manage to quash it—and once more his orgasm died aborning.
Hello, Valhalla, Joe Miniver speaking, fresh from yet another day on the hustings. Gimme a valve job, new points and plugs, an oil change—don’t forget to clean the filter—and check the radiator too, would you?
* * *
YEARS PEELED OFF the cinematic calendar. Joe luxuriated in ethereal aches. All his dreams held winning tickets. In the past, whenever something threatened him, Heidi had always said, “I’ll protect you, Joey, I’ll wrap you in a pink cocoon of friendly vapor, I’ll snuggle you in a pink cloud and nothing will hurt you.” Wrapped in that pink cloud right now, Joe felt infinitely protected, “at one” (his subconscious believed was the expression) with all of life, swaddled in cotton candy and Christmas fiberglass, aswoon in the giddy warmth.
He dreamed of his 1.7-acre farm. Bees swarmed around a dozen hives and among several rows of raspberry bushes planted specially to make their nectar more delicious. In a gingerbread shack the kids were squeezing the combs, extracting pure honey. A modest and yet comfortable solar-heated house stood next to the orchard. Their other energy came from a windmill, and a Tesla coil tapping the earth’s magnetic goodies. The garden had cabbages as big as basketballs, strawberries as fat as valentines. Forty chickens in the new coop provided countless eggs each day. Fruit trees groaned under the weight of apples, plums, and pears. Eight sheep, a few cows, and Heather’s pinto pony grazed in their small fields. Outside, in the nude, Heidi worked on the final painting for her upcoming one-person show at the Houston Fine Arts Museum. Heather, whom some had pegged as the next prima ballerina in the western hemisphere, was doing some free-form cartwheels on the lawn. In the driveway, Michael showed two Yankee scouts and a handful of metropolitan-newspaper reporters how he had developed the phenomenal pitching control that had garnered him a multimillion-dollar contract at the age of eighteen: he was throwing Spaldeen pimpleballs through a knothole in the garage door at thirty paces, just like his daddy had taught him. And Joe?—well, Joe was in the back field training the new Irish setter he would take grouse-hunting that autumn.…