“I gave you a straight answer,” Heather protested. “I know who did it. I saw it happen!”
“Squealer!” Michael spat with astonishing vehemence. “Stool pigeon!”
Joe said, “You mean you watched them break his nose and you didn’t even try to help him?”
“They were all bigger than me!” Heather’s arrogant eyes widened in outraged innocence.
“I wouldn’t want any help from any girl anyway,” Michael said.
Joe turned on him. “What’s the matter with a girl? Why did you say that?”
Michael had received enough feminist brainwashing to realize he’d made a cavernous goof. In lieu of defending himself, he clammed up.
“Women happen to be just as good fighters as men.” Joe wondered unhappily how in the name of God Almighty they had landed on this particular rap! “Not only do they make good doctors and excellent parachute jumpers, but they are also exceptional warriors. Who do you think did half the fighting in Vietnam, enabling that backward, poorly equipped country to defeat the most powerful military machine ever assembled? Who do you think makes up half the Chinese army? Who do you think some of the most skilled black-belt karate experts in the world are? Women! That’s who they are!”
“Yeah,” Heather chimed in. “Women hold up half the sky, y’know.”
Joe ordered his daughter to stifle. “You don’t have to goad him any more than you already have.”
Dripping venomous sarcasm, Heidi said, “That’s right, Heather, darling. Despite Daddy’s liberal rhetoric, he doesn’t want you ever to forget that little girls should be seen, not heard.”
Joe protested. “Wait a minute. I don’t see any reason why she has a right to taunt Michael while I’m reading him a riot act.”
“So you told her to shut up. Of course, why not? Men have been telling women to shut up for ten thousand years.”
“She’s not a ‘woman,’ she’s a little child. On top of that, sometimes—including right now—she’s a real brat! And besides, I can’t make her be quiet any other way. She never listens to me. Michael never listens to me. You never listen to me. In fact, nobody ever listens to me. I might as well scream at the stars.”
“Why don’t you try not screaming, for once. You might find communication would improve immensely. It seems that your method of making a point is to yell so loud everybody’s intimidated whether they think you make any sense or not.”
Joe said, “I give up, I really do. You win. I don’t believe it. I blew it again, you’re right, it’s incredible, I’m sorry, good-bye.”
“Wait a minute. Don’t leave.”
“Why? What can I accomplish here?” Those old debbil tears commenced again. “All I have to do is cross the threshold, and everybody acts like I’m a fox that just entered the chicken coop looking for a fat pullet. Frenzy! Feathers everywhere! Cackle, cackle, cackle!”
“I hate to say this, but you bring most of it on yourself.”
“I know. I got lousy karma, right? Last week, what was his name, that freak from Alexander’s Ragtime Crash Pad? He was walking down the highway shoulder at ten P.M. when a car of teen-agers pulled over, jumped out, and beat him insensate with clubs, chains, and hammers. Now he’s lying in the Our Lady of the Sorrows Hospital paralyzed from the neck down and doomed to be a vegetable forever. So I’m sitting in the Prince of Whales—when was it? I guess about last Thursday—talking about it with several people, among them Jeff Orbison and Spumoni Tatarsky, when you know what that fucking Spumoni said?”
They stared at him.
“You know what he actually said to me?”
Michael shook his head. Heather locked her eyes expectantly into her father’s face. Heidi said, “What?”
For dramatic emphasis, Joe added, “I mean, you know, these are supposed to be semi-intelligent human beings we’re dealing with here. Granted, Spumoni is a trifle weird, but the guy actually went to college; he’s got a piece of paper says he earned a degree. And Jeff?—that man actually has a doctorate. He’s a PhD!”
Joe halted: they waited.
“So you know what went down?” he repeated, enraged, the spittle flying.
“For God’s sake, what?”
It happened. The entire lesson—the point of his story, the thing he wished to prove—abruptly dislodged from his brain and slid sideways. Joe drew a blank. In the heart of his rage, at the apex of his moral, he blew it. Mouth hanging open, he stared back at them, perplexed, slightly bemused, and then horrified. On the threshold of an important punch line, his mind had bailed out.
Dumbfounded, Joe remained frozen, his hands raised in a pertinent gesture the reason for which he had completely forgotten. After a few puzzling seconds had ticked away, he had to admit: “I forget.”
“What do you mean, you forget?”
“I forget what I meant to say. I don’t even remember what I was talking about.”
“Karma.”
“Karma?” It rang no bell.
“Yeah, karma. And Jeff Orbison’s PhD.”
“But why? I mean, I was on the brink of saying something important.…”
“You were talking about that guy from Alexander’s Ragtime Crash Pad who they almost killed last week,” Heather offered.
“I know that, dummy. But what was the point?” Joe knuckled his eyes, then ran fingers back through his hair, guessing that sometime over the past few days he must have been deftly lobotomized by some duendi prankster employed by that particular devil in charge of ridiculing dignity and promoting overt idiocy and shame.
Heidi said, “You baffle me, Joey. One minute you’re talking about chicken feathers everywhere, next minute you’re ranting about some wounded jerk from Alexander’s Ragtime Crash Pad.”
“Yeah, but why? I mean, there was a point. The freak, and the crash pad, and Spumoni Tatarsky.…”
Bewildered and defeated, Joe sat down. Or anyway, he started to settle into their lumpy Salvation Army chair when Heather shrieked, “Daddy, don’t!”
Don’t what—rape her? Plunk down atop a venomous cobra? Set his butt into a fauteuil booby-trapped with punji sticks or the kind of plastic device used by renegade French army officers protesting Algerian independence?
Joe halted, shaped like a question mark, halfway there.
“You’re gonna sit on Baby Erica!”
Grappling beneath himself, Joe located a small raggedy doll wrapped in wax paper and pincushioned with needles. A paper taped on her forehead said: “Erika, kidnee and hart.”
“We were playing hospital,” Heather explained. “Erica’s sick.”
Distastefully, Joe assessed the doll. “What’s with all the needles?”
“She’s getting a cute puncher for her kidney.”
“A what?”
“A cute puncher for her kidney. That’s what the Chinese people do. They put you on a table and stick needles inside you and it makes you better. They can even stick a needle in your neck and cut your brain open if they want.”
“Acupuncture.” Joe slumped wearily into the chair. “The word, Heather, is acupuncture.”
“That’s what I said, a cute puncher.”
Superior Michael begged to differ. “It’s not ‘a cute puncher,’ Heather, you moron. It’s ‘acupuncture,’ just like Daddy said.”
“I am not a moron. You’re a moron—”
“Quiet!” Joe literally wrung his hands. “We really don’t need to argue over who’s a moron right now. It’s not in the script.”
From the refrigerator, Heidi selected a beer. She offered the can to Joe: “Want one?”
“Sure, why not? Beer makes it great.”
She remained there, her knee propping open the door as she pensively scanned the Frigidaire’s jumbled innards. Apparently, she had decided to drive him crazy, for nothing rattled Joe more than to see somebody wasting God knows how much electricity (one-sixteenth of one-tenth of one-half a milliwatt?), and spoiling God knows how much food (one-tenth of one cell in a celery stick?), by
gratuitously leaving the refrigerator door ajar. It had long been a heavy bone of contention between them. Heidi could watch the inside of a refrigerator the same way most people gooned at television.
“Heidi, maybe if you leave the refrigerator door open long enough an owl will fly in and start nesting.”
She replied, “I can’t decide what I want—but I’ve got it narrowed down to one of two things, either the strychnine or the cyanide.”
“Very funny.”
“You started it with your snide owl comment.”
“Well, in case you didn’t notice, electricity costs money.”
“Joey, if I hold the refrigerator door open for twenty seconds, what’s that going to cost extra at the end of the month—eighteen demimils?”
He was too tired to answer. Ten minutes inside this house, and already his body, which had arrived in the pink of condition, was dismally fatigued.
Michael abandoned his puzzle and whispered in Heather’s ear. She listened raptly, then asked, “Daddy, are you gonna wrestle with us tonight?”
“Sure, why not? Maybe I can bash Michael’s nose so bad he winds up breathing from his asshole.”
“Da-ddy!”
“I’m all right,” Michael pleaded urgently. “You won’t bug my nose. It doesn’t hurt at all.”
“So let’s leave it like that. Thank God for small favors.”
“Aw, Daddy…”
“But I’m okay,” Michael insisted. “I won’t even let my head get near you. I’ll just wrestle with my feet.”
“Lemme paint for you the scenario,” Joe said wearily. “Eighteen seconds after we begin, I heave Heather off my chest, and she lands on top of you, who’ve got me in a scissors grip. Quite by accident, of course, her elbow, driving backwards and downwards to break her fall, drills into your shnoz like a jackhammer, not only rebreaking your nose, but sending ninety-seven razor-sharp splinters of cartilage and bone up into your brain, either killing you instantly, or damaging that part of the cerebellum controlling your immunity system, meaning that for the rest of your life you’ll have to live in a germ-free bubble, which will cost us all our savings in the first three weeks.…”
“I’m tired of your doomsday bullshit.” Heidi took a noisy, challenging drag from her beer. “If he wants to wrestle, let him wrestle. If you don’t want to, at least be honest and say so, don’t blame it on Michael’s nose.”
“If I smash his nose again and we have to rush him to the emergency room, that’s thirty dollars just to walk through the door,” Joe said angrily. “I don’t understand where any of you people are coming from, I really don’t. How can you be so cavalier about a broken nose?”
“I could wear my football helmet,” Michael suggested hopefully.
“Oh great. You wear your football helmet, then I get at least a broken nose, or, just possibly, a concussion.”
“It won’t hurt his nose to wrestle,” Heather pleaded. “Come on, Daddy, please?”
“No. It’s crazy. Haven’t we got enough free bad luck without going out and deliberately recruiting some more?”
“Well, that’s too bad.” Heidi released a pregnant sigh. “I know Michael and Heather were looking forward to it. They so rarely have a chance to interact with you these days.”
“If you had a broken nose would you wrestle?” Joe asked incredulously.
“Yes, under the circumstances, I think I would.”
“Under what circumstances?”
“Well, these. I mean, you promised, Joey. And I don’t think this is the best time in the lives of our children to begin breaking promises.”
“And you really think I won’t hurt his nose?”
“Not if you’re routinely careful, no.”
“Can you guarantee something horrible won’t happen?”
“Sure, I guarantee it. All you have to do is exercise a modicum of constraint. Of course, I realize that for you these days that presents quite a challenge—”
“All right, I’ll wrestle. Just so long as we make one thing perfectly clear. If that nose gets clobbered, I ain’t taking the rap.”
Both kids shouted “Yaaayyy!” Heather assured him, “Don’t worry, Daddy, we’ll be extra special careful.” They raced from the room.
Joe called, “Where are you going?”
“Uniforms!”
Heidi smiled. “There. See how easy it is to make children deliriously happy?”
“But if his nose gets clobbered again…”
“It won’t. Believe me.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I said it won’t. I promise. I guarantee it.”
“Just so that everybody understands it’s not my fault if—”
“No ifs, Joey. It’s simply not going to happen.”
Who had she been talking to, Nikita Smatterling again? Joe cleared furniture to the side. Then, with much grunting and cursing, he retrieved the double mattress from the master bedroom, and dumped it in the middle of the living room. Removing his shoes, he assumed a lotus position on the mattress, folded his arms, and adopted an evil, leering expression. The kids returned. Michael wore a baseball cap, a Luke Skywalker T-shirt, Jockey underwear, and purple knee socks. Heather sported a Japanese bandanna, a red body-suit, and white bobby-sox.
Joe raised his hands, the fingers bent like monster claws, gnashing his teeth. Gleefully, the kids pranced around the mattress, swerving close then leaping away as his deadly talons swiped at them. Briefly, they huddled, planning an attack. Joe gestured menacingly and snarled out his usual bag of derisions: “Come on, you lily-livered lilliputians, I dare you to attack. Come here, you chickenshit little scaredy-cats, I wanna crush your heads like eggshells.”
The preliminaries endured about five minutes. Michael and Heather positioned themselves on either side of him, Michael shouted “One, two, three!” and, simultaneously, they charged. Joe embraced their jet-propelled bodies with an “oof!” and the wrestle began.
Their momentum knocked him over sideways. Their goal was to pin down his arms, and knuckle-drill his sternum. They rarely succeeded, but had fun trying. At the penultimate moment, Joe always worked himself free in a frenzy of grunting, gasping, and blasphemy. The kids continuously shouted orders to each other: “Get his arm, Heather. Get his arm!” “I can’t. He’s got me in a headlock.” “Well, then, pinch his ass!” Ass pinching was acceptable torture. Likewise, foot tickling. The kids constantly shrieked and jerked spastically, kicking away from Joe’s fingers scrabbling in their armpits. Gently, he tossed them all over the place. Constantly, he pinned down one kid, and, like a moustachioed black-hatted villain tormenting a railroad-tracked victim, he threatened to do horrible damage. But the free child always pounced to the rescue in the nick of time, leaping on Joe’s back, bowling him over, and hollering, “I gots him, get away!”
Joe loved it. What cornball theater! He gasped, gurgled, grunted, groaned, hissed, wheezed, whimpered, threatened, and pleaded. It was rough play, yet they rarely got hurt. Everyone understood the physical limits of the game. In fact, as he flopped and tussled, Joe felt almost relaxed. He loved the way they became intertangled in a big ball of fulminating arms and legs. Especially he loved the absolute thrill wrestling gave to Michael and Heather. Their eyes sparkled with champagne energy. They pranced, swatted, and danced like cavorting kittens. Joe believed this wrestling was the biggest immediate pleasure he could give his kids.
In the heart of this particular frenzied loving tussle, Joe started drifting. Tranquillity settled into his body as the kids tugged on his arms and legs. The world became a sunny place, and easy to comprehend: gentle, innocent, compassionate. He fantasized that he should do this for a living: Joe Miniver, Professional Wrestler of Children. They were contorted amorously around each other in a delirious helium atmosphere, lighter than air, wonderfully insouciant and happy. Joe threatened to commit unbelievably horrible mayhem upon their wiry little bodies; he became inebriated on their giggles. Oh wow, he thought. Everything’s
gonna be all right! Heather and Michael, Renaissance angels, fluttered their creamy golden wings, and collided against his body like enormous holiday kisses.
Bam!
The usual, sickening collision. Even without seeing it, Joe knew that the back of Heather’s head had crunched into Michael’s broken nose.
For a second, the usual stunned silence ensued—that hesitant, totally dead period before the squall. And then:
Not noise, so much, as blood. As if a gigantic pig-bladder hanging over their heads and full of the stuff had been stabbed open with a knife, they were—all three of them—instantly drenched in crimson. Then they rolled away from each other, Heather in tears, Michael on his knees, his head against the mattress and his ass in the air, making queer, shocked, guttural sounds. Finally, maybe ten seconds after the fact, Joe heard Heidi’s shout: “Oh no!”
In the next instant, it seemed as if ever since the kids’ births, his life had been a series of traumatic emergency situations interspersed with a series of drills preparing for traumatic situations. Heather commenced bawling, not from hurt, but because she had caused such damage, and knew that the best way to stave off blame was to feign pain and hysteria. Michael was in too much agony to cry. Spouting blood, he allowed himself to be grabbed, hoisted, and carted unceremoniously down to the car by his father, while his mother trailed behind wailing, “Oh God! I’m sorry! You were right! I’m sorry! Oh God!”
How sweet it is! a tiny portion of Joe’s brain managed to gloat through all his emergency adrenaline. Vengeance is mine!
* * *
THE BUS STARTER clicked and went dead. Frantically, Joe grabbed the pliers, clobbered his head diving under the right rear tire, jumped the starter, scrambled back into the car, and—brrrroooom!—they were off.
Juan Fangio, starring in—dahdle-a-dah-de-dah … charge!—A Race Against Death! They made it, as somehow they always did, to the hospital. And burst through the emergency-entrance door. As usual, nobody was on duty. No nurse, no doctor, no ambulance driver, no paramedic. Nobody but a janitor maneuvering a mop and a bucket was on hand to stem the bloody flow.