“How did you came out so unscathed?”
“I’m tricky,” I said, weaving and bobbing in my seat like I was trying to avoid a punch. “But did you see Todd Randolph? He got hit with a carton of chocolate milk.”
We both laughed; Todd Randolph was usually on the giving end of a joke—practical, mean, or otherwise—and so it was especially gratifying to see him on the receiving end, especially considering he’d been wearing a white sweatshirt.
The arm of the record player clicked as it dropped an album, and when the needle found its first groove, the voice of Maria Callas filled the art room. In Mr. Eggert’s class, we listened mostly to rock, but every now and then he liked to demonstrate “passion expressed a little differently.”
Darva got back to her magazines; her self-portrait as a fifty-year-old was a collage of motion. On a big piece of posterboard, she’d pasted hundreds of birds, from pretty little canaries to condors, along with butterflies, airplanes, and spaceships.
With the side of my little finger, I brushed the droppings of my eraser off the paper. I had originally started sketching my face but, copying Darva (she was just so good), had decided instead to portray my fifty-year-old self as an idea. But it seemed my muse was taking a nap from which she didn’t want to wake, and so I decided I would sketch a tree. I can’t say that it represented a depth of character I hoped to attain by then, or any kind of strength or new growth, but I was smart enough to realize that other people might interpret it as such.
“So I got my ticket,” said Darva, cutting out the face of a loon from a National Geographic.
Darkening the side of a branch with my pencil, I tried to answer in my head the question Mr. Eggert often asked: Where’s your light source? I looked past Darva out the window, trying to see how the light played on the row of linden trees lined up along the boulevard.
“My ticket to Europe, as long as you’re asking,” said Darva. “But please, your enthusiasm is embarrassing.”
I let my eyes settle on Darva. “Sorry. I was in the moment.”
It was an expression Mr. Eggert used; his goal, he had told us, was to teach us “to be in the moment” and “to let your art be all that exists while you’re in my classroom.”
She smiled, and because it was one of those smiles with so much invitation in it, I smiled back.
“So you got your ticket and you’re going to Europe,” I said, showing her that my moment hadn’t been completely pure.
“Yep. I’m going to work the whole summer and save every dime so I can leave in September.”
“Still going by yourself?”
Darva lowered her head and looked at me over her tinted glasses. “Why, are you finally ready to throw away convention and come join me?”
“You’d ditch me for the first Frenchman you met.”
“Well, I’m landing in Amsterdam. So I’d probably ditch you for the first Dutchman.”
“If you hadn’t already made plans with the guy who sits next to you on the plane.”
She dabbed glue on the loon’s mouth, explaining that he was foaming at the mouth.
“How does a loon represent you at fifty?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Don’t you think we’ll all have gone a little crazy by then?”
I looked at Darva and was seized with a desire to lean across the table and kiss her on her strawberry-scented lips.
“Seriously, Joe. Off in the great wide world—we’d have fun! And I know it’d make my mother feel a lot better if I went with someone.”
Darva’s parents were old—her siblings had been out of the house before she was born—and I knew that as much as she wanted to get out of the house and away from her parents, she worried about them.
“I’ll take a rain check,” I said, not about to give up my own dream of going to the U of M in the fall and playing hockey for the Golden Gophers.
Maria Callas’s voice ran up a ladder not many voices climb and then raced down it, and as the orchestra swelled beneath Callas, Darva got back to her picture of flight and I got back to my tree.
Heavy rain kept customers away from the store that night, and Ed—he had long ago told me to call him by his first name instead of Mr. Haugland—had let two-thirds of his employees punch out and go home. The rest of us were all in a goofy everybody’s-gone-but-us mood.
Up at the cash registers, Kirk the bag boy was reading the National Enquirer out loud, his voice as deep and dramatic as an actor reciting Shakespeare.
“Who was that man Ann-Margret was seen with?” He looked up, his face twisted with concern. “I implore you, who was it?”
Wendy, the cute college junior whose miniskirts, much to the delight of all males on the premises, were almost as short as her work smock, laughed and told him to shut up, didn’t he know she had a biology test to study for?
“I could teach you something about biology you wouldn’t find in that book,” I said, to which the cashier folded her arms across her chest and said, “In your dreams, Joe.”
Kirk licked his finger and hissed—teenage lingo for She burned you good.
“But you,” she said to Kirk, “I wouldn’t mind going over Chapter Three with you.” She lowered her head and blinked her eyelashes. “It’s all about reproduction.”
“Won’t I need a note from my parents?” asked Kirk, his voice rising an octave. “Or from my pediatrician?”
A voice came over the in-store PA system.
“I hate to break up the laughs, kids, but, Joe, I need you in my office, ASAP.”
I bowed to Ed, looking out the little sliding glass window in his office that overlooked the store.
“And bring me an RC while you’re at it.”
Ed was sitting behind his desk, an electric guitar in his lap.
“Wow,” I said, setting the bottle of pop on his desk. “Nice Telecaster.”
Ed smiled proudly and strummed the strings. “Thanks. I thought this might be the perfect thing for slow nights like this.”
“You mean you’re going to play it?”
A blush washed over the store owner’s face and into the deep recession of his hairline.
“Figure it’s about time.”
This was big news; Ed had told me he’d been so disconsolate about the breakup of his band and taking over the running of the store, he’d stopped playing the guitar altogether.
“Well, that’s great, Ed. Too bad I don’t have an electric keyboard. We could sit up here and jam.”
“That’s right,” said Ed, a rare look of excitement replacing his usual expression of boredom and regret. “Let someone else remind Mrs. Emery she can’t use expired coupons! Let someone else bust Mr. Snowbeck when he shoplifts Twinkies! Let someone else clean up spilled milk in aisle two!”
“Take it easy, Ed—you can’t throw the store into anarchy just because you got a new guitar!”
Laughing, Ed held the Telecaster like a rifle and pretended to shoot from it.
“Anarchy,” he said when he was done firing his imaginary bullets. “Do you realize how long it’s been since I’ve done anything that even vaguely resembles anarchy?”
He didn’t wait to let me venture a guess.
“Too long. From now on, I’m not just Ed Haugland, grocery store owner; I’m Ed Haugland, gui-Tarzan.” He looked at me, his pale blue eyes brimming with intensity. “You really play the keyboard?”
I shrugged. “Ed, you came to the talent show, remember?”
“Oh yeah—you were good!”
His hand splayed out, he held the guitar against his chest and leaned toward me, the expression on his face racheted up a notch, from excitement to glee.
“Hey, you know what? I’ve got a keyboard! It belonged to Des Gunderson, and when our band broke up, he sold it to me for five bucks. Poor old Des is selling washers and dryers down at Sears now. Not that he was Jerry Lee Lewis or anything—but man, I didn’t think he’d end up at Sears, selling washers and dryers.” I could see him settling back, making r
oom for his usual moroseness, but then, like a rogue elf, he cackled. “I’ll bring it in tomorrow, okay? Oh wait, you don’t work tomorrow, do you? Well, it’ll be here on Monday.”
“Great,” I said, not knowing if it would be or not, but I was not the kind of guy to rain on the rare parade that Ed Haugland was finally riding in.
Ed strummed the strings, his fingers moving from a C chord to a G minor. He hadn’t plugged in his guitar, so it made a tinny, faraway sound. I got up, figuring I’d been dismissed.
“Hey, look who came out in the rain,” I said, seeing out the window the hunched figure of old Mr. Snowbeck. He stood in the snacks, crackers, and cookie aisle, and after one furtive glance to his left and another to his right, his gnarled, liver-spotted hand darted out of his pocket, grabbed a box of Twinkies, and shoved them into his open coat.
“I’ll go shake him down, boss,” I said in my best Bowery Boys voice.
The grocer shook his head. “Nah, let him be. Poor old geezer’s gotta think he can get away with something once in a while.”
It was still raining hard at closing time, and we raced like star sprinters to the car.
“Fuckin’ A!” said Kirk, slamming the passenger-side door. “What is this, monsoon season?”
“I think you get torrential rains during monsoon season. This is a deluge.”
“Thanks for giving me a ride. I’d be waiting here all night—I’d drown before my sister picked me up.”
“What’s she doing tonight?” I asked, keeping my voice casual. It had been three weeks and two days (you better believe I counted) since I’d last been serviced, and Lord knows I was desperate for one of Kristi’s very special lube jobs.
“Who knows?” Kyle turned on the radio and twirled the knob until he got to KQ. “Oh man, Jethro Tull. Cool.”
I turned on the defroster and backed out of the lot. We lived close enough to Haugland’s that I usually walked or rode my bike to work, but it was raining so hard that my aunt had offered me the keys to her new Mustang.
“I mean, listen to this part,” said Kyle, turning up the volume. “Who’da thought a flute could sound so cool?”
To me, the guy played the flute like he was on speed, but to each his own.
We drove down the parkway, the rain hammering the car, obscuring the view in between each swish of the windshield wipers. Even though the heat was on, I was shivering my ass off and I imagined Kirk was too, although the violent head bobbing he was doing to the music was probably warming him up some.
“You mind if I sit here till the song—or the rain—is over?” asked Kirk when I pulled up in front of his house.
“How about the song? This rain’s gonna last all night.”
“Cool.”
I turned off the ignition and then turned the key so that the radio came back on. Kirk turned up the volume and sang along to “Aqualung,” his hands crabbed as he played a mini air guitar. The rain, like thousands of dropped nails, banged on the car roof, and the tires of a car passing by splashed through the water.
As the song faded out and the silky knowing voice of the DJ came on, Kirk leaned toward the windshield, squinting his eyes.
“Is that Heinz?”
“Who?”
“Shit,” he said, opening the door, “it is Heinz!”
He tore out of the car, slamming the door, and I watched him, a blur racing through the rain.
I sat there for a moment, but there was no way I could drive off without finding out who this Heinz guy was—some East German refugee who brewed homemade beer and cobbled the Casey family’s shoes while waiting to see if he’d been granted political asylum? Figuring I was already wet, I got out of the car and ran after Kirk. I chased him up onto a lawn and near a row of shrubbery.
“Come on, Heinzy, don’t be scared. Come on, boy.”
My shoes squishing in the wet grass, I knelt by Kirk.
“Oh,” I said. “Heinz is a dog.”
“A puppy, actually. We just got him a week ago.” He whistled softly. “Come on, boy.”
The dog was cowering under the bush, and nudging its branches aside with his shoulder, Kirk stretched his arm until he finally got hold of the puppy’s collar.
“There you go, buddy,” he said, and after tucking the whimpering dog into his open jacket. He took off, running across several lawns to his house. Hunched over in the driving rain, I ran behind him, and when he shoved open the back door, I followed him inside.
“Mom!” he hollered. “Mom—who let Heinz out?”
He took a shriveled towel off the stove handle and, holding the dog on the kitchen counter, began rubbing him dry. The puppy’s body vibrated with shivers.
“Poor little Heinzy,” murmured Kirk, rubbing the spaniel’s long ears.
A door swung wide open and banged against the kitchen counter.
“Made it,” said a woman, dodging the door as it swung back, but when her drink sloshed out of her glass, the triumph faded from her voice.
“Shit.” She looked at us and giggled. “I mean, shoot.”
“Mom, why’d you let Heinz out without his leash?” said Kirk. “You know he’s too little to be outside without his leash—and it’s pouring outside, did you know that?”
“From the looks of you, I can make that deduction,” she said, saying each word with a strained precision. “You should get out of those wet clothes, Kirk, and you”—she waved her hand at me, and the smoke from her cigarette zigzagged—“whoever you are, should get out of those wet clothes too.”
“That’s Joe, Mom. And Joe, that’s my mom.”
“How do you do, Mrs. Casey?”
The woman’s face brightened, and the smile she offered was a worn-down, blurry version of Kristi’s.
“Well, I do very well, young man.” She held up her glass in a salute. “Thank you so much for asking.”
She sat down at the uncleared kitchen table, ashing her cigarette in a saucer.
“And for your information, I did not let little Heinzy out—your father did. After he crapped on the rug.” She smiled again, pointing her cigarette at Kirk. “The dog, that is, not your father.”
“Come on, Joe,” said Kirk, bundling the puppy under his arm, “let’s go to my room.”
“Nice to have met you,” I said.
Nodding, her eyes half-closed, Mrs. Casey inhaled her cigarette. “I mean it, Kirk—give him some dry clothes and put his in the dryer.” She exhaled a long stream of smoke. “I will not have this polite young man catch his death in my house.”
On the television, Mary Tyler Moore was yukking it up with Mr. Grant, but there was no one in the living room appreciating whatever joke had just been told, at least no one conscious.
“And that’s my dad,” said Kirk, pushing aside a metal walker as we passed a man sprawled out on the couch, snoring. One arm hung limply, its hand open, as if reaching for the empty glass that lay on its side on the carpet.
As a paperboy in junior high, I always liked collection days, standing inside entryways, waiting for the man or woman of the house to find their wallet or coin purse to pay me. I always liked the surprise glimpses inside households: the paintings and sculptures of nudes filling the school librarian’s parlor, the Edith Piaf records that were always blasting in the motorcycle mechanic’s little rambler, the smells of chocolate chip cookies or baking bread that filled the house of Mrs. Tompkins, a crabby lady who never tipped me once. There were two parish houses on my route and both of them smelled like medicine, the Lutheran one like Pepto-Bismol and the Catholic one like cough syrup; if I thought about it, Pastor Johnson always did look like he had a stomachache and Father Frank was always hacking away, the phlegm gurgling in his throat like rainwater through a gutter.
The Casey house smelled of cigarettes and liquor and the kind of couches you see for sale at the Goodwill. It was not what I expected from the house Kristi Casey burst out of into the world every morning.
I felt kind of stupid, but less stupid than cold, so I changed i
nto a bathrobe that Kirk gave me. His bedroom was in the basement, right next to the laundry room, and I could hear my tennis shoes banging around in the dryer with the rest of our clothes.
Kirk put a couple of 45s on an old record player. His room was much more organized than the rest of the house: his Mad magazines and Archie comic books and issues of Amazing Stories in neat piles on a shelf, his bed made, the linoleum-tiled floor relatively free of clothes. We sat around on two taped-up beanbag chairs, throwing the dog a rolled-up pair of socks Kirk got out of his dresser.
“Sorry about my parents. They’re not always like that.”
I shrugged, and while I tried to think of something not completely lame to say, Kirk added, “Usually they’re a lot worse.”
I laughed, and then, thinking maybe he wasn’t joking, I stopped. That made Kirk laugh—the kid was nothing if not astute—and then I had to laugh a little more and we settled back, tossing Heinz his sock ball while we listened to 45s.
After a while the puppy lost interest in the socks and settled into Kirk’s lap, and I thumbed through the little boxes with handles the records were stored in.
“Man, you’ve got a lot of these.”
“I collect them. I’ve got everyone from Anka to Zimmerman.”
“Zimmerman?”
“Bob Dylan. I wanted to impress you with the breadth of my collection—you know, A to Z—but I couldn’t think of any Z’s except Dylan’s real name.”
“But Anka?” I asked the kid who had been playing air guitar to Jethro Tull. “You listen to Paul Anka?”
“A collector doesn’t have to listen to everything he collects.”
“Hey,” I said, pulling out a record in a paper sleeve. “‘Red Rubber Ball.’ The summer I was going into ninth grade this song was playing on the radio all the time. I used have a little transistor that hung from the bars of my banana bike—I’d have to change the batteries about every other day ’cause I played it so much.
“And look at this—‘Cherish’! That song reminds me of my friend Steve’s older sister, Dee Ann Alquist. She ratted her hair about this high”—I held my hand a half foot above my head—“and she had a little heart necklace that would disappear deep in the vee of her V-neck sweaters.”