Blood Test, page 6
But now, after I park the car, I sit back for a moment to watch the parade of disguises. Little girls dressed up in gauzy princess attire walk hand in hand with their parents, who are costumed as themselves—mere tired citizens—although one father holding his daughter’s hand wears a Catholic priest’s vestments, giving him a child-molesting vibe. A little Darth Vader, carrying a bucket with candy, walks next to a diminutive short-haired girl (I think she’s a girl) who looks very much like Harry Potter, and next to them is a very plausible teenaged Spider-man hopping around, a gymnast, almost weightless. Here and there among the heroes and villains and unicorns walk a few ghosts. Someone is carrying a sign, Martians, Go Home! A little Hulk walks beside a toddling Wolverine. Where’s Thor? Over there, near the bushes, is a pint-sized Santa Claus.
The corpse that I saw a few minutes ago is now lying on the sidewalk over there like a real corpse. The children walk around him. I hear one girl cry out, “Oh, I guess he must be dead,” and then she walks on past the body down the sidewalk.
It occurs to me—I’m not sure how or why—that maybe the person lying on the sidewalk is actually and newly dead. It could happen. And this thought leads to another one: the Mexicans, our fine neighbors to the south, are quite sensible about death or, as they might think about it, Death, a sort of skeletal character with a capital “D.” Death is a member of the family in Mexico, a close relative. They devote an entire day, the Day of the Dead, November 1, to its celebration. Americans would rather sweep death under the rug than celebrate it, a clear mistake. You don’t want Death to be the uninvited guest at the end of your life but someone (or something) you’ve hung around with for many of your adult years and gotten used to. We have Memorial Day, of course, which is not celebratory, but a Protestant chore: flowers, twenty-one-gun salutes, prayers, silence. No fun there. In Mexico, Death is a partygoer. Death greets you at the door and hands you a drink. Maybe it’s poison but so what? Forget gloom. Break out the pinwheels, the tequila, the brass band, and the casket.
Why am I thinking about the Day of the Dead instead of the actual possibly dead guy across the street from me? I should help him. It’s a failure of go-get-’em empathy on my part, I guess.
I get out of my car and walk over to where he’s laid out. The corpse has not moved, and it makes no sound. Either this character is an expert pretender, or Death has actually caught up with him and tagged him. As I approach the body, children and adults get out of my way, but once I am close enough to him—it—I see that the body on the ground is that of one of my clients, Edward Ratner, who has a homeowner’s umbrella policy and car insurance through my agency. No life insurance, though! A nice enough guy, an electrician, with what they used to call chiseled features. As I recall, he once played for the Kingsboro High School football team, the Screaming Eagles. A star linebacker, if memory serves, known as the “brick wall,” although I may be mistaken about that. But now the brick wall is lying down, flattened.
By the time I get to him, he has attracted a crowd, and one adult is bent over him, pounding his chest and breathing into his mouth. Will Ed Ratner be resuscitated? From a distance comes the hee-haw of an ambulance making its way toward us. Gazing down, I see that Ed has stubble, is wearing a pair of glasses, and sports a relatively clean white shirt and jeans. He still has a strong jaw, for all the good it will do him now. The only way that you’d know he was a corpse before he fell down is that he was wearing a set of vampire teeth that the Good Samaritan has removed, and his face is painted chalk white, a death indicator. What’s he doing out here? He must have been accompanying some kids, but I don’t see his children anywhere nearby. Maybe they ran away to get help. Maybe they were actually scared as opposed to pseudoscared.
The crowd is milling around, and there, off to my right, is Joe, my son, wearing a straw hat and overalls, farmer getup, and he’s got his skateboard in one hand and his iPhone in the other. I catch his glance, and he gives back a quick, quizzical nod, as if he’s not sure what I’m doing out here, or what he’s doing here, either. He’s carrying a tin pail for handouts, which he’s too old for. Teens like to go out on Halloween to create mischief. Making my way over toward Ed Ratner, I elbow people aside and touch him, whereupon his eyes open as if he’s been brought back to life. One woman in the crowd says, “He’s resurrected!” I hear the approaching siren before I see the vehicle, but within seconds Ed Ratner is surrounded by EMTs, who have pushed away the rubberneckers and the resuscitation worker and are restoring the recent corpse. A gurney has been lowered, and they’ve injected Ed with life-giving adrenaline (but his life is my doing: I have brought him back to life) and put a respirator mask over his nose and mouth. Joe watches closely, and before you know it, Ed Ratner sits up a little, back from the dead and the visions of the afterlife, including moving toward the light—inadvisable according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead—and eternal judgment and the Heaven and Hell options (unless all he did was pass out), and they load him into the ambulance and speed him off to emergency care. That’s that.
The crowd disperses as the kids go on their merry way, and I head toward Joe, who seems to have lost interest in trick-or-treating. He’s staring vacantly down the street as if a parade of floats and baton twirlers wearing short skirts might suddenly appear. When I approach him, he looks at me with something like apathy.
“Did you do that?” he asks me.
“No ‘hello’? No ‘Hi, Dad’? No pleasantries?”
“Not this time, I guess,” he says, looking less and less like a farmer and more like a kid dressed up in farmer clothes. “What are you doing here? Did you try to kill that guy? Or resurrect him?”
“Um, no. What makes you think so?”
“That blood test you took. I figure it gives you permission to do, like, anything. Right?”
“Where did you hear that? I only got the test results a little while ago.”
“I’m just guessing. So you didn’t murder that guy or anything?”
“Nope. Not this time. Not ever. Besides, he’s a client of mine. It’s not smart to murder your customers. Cuts down on the commissions.”
“Maybe soon, your life of crime? Anyway, that guy. So you didn’t do anything to him?”
“Of course not. Why would I?”
“Oh, just for the hell of it. I mean, if Clark Kent could turn into Superman, you can turn into a homicidal maniac. Anyone could. I’m not, like, saying you did. Watch the news. Ordinary people blow their fuses and start shooting strangers. So why are you here?”
“I was looking for you.”
“Why?”
“My car’s over there.” I point to where it’s parked. “Let me drive you to your mom and Burt’s house.”
“I’ve got my skateboard.”
“Joe, please. We need to talk. Then I’ll take you to Burt and your mom’s.”
“Oh,” he says. “All right.”
He loads his skateboard into the backseat and I get behind the wheel while he galumphs into the passenger side and attaches his lap-and-shoulder belt. When I look over at him, I see that he has an expression on his face of impatient teen despair, a first cousin to exasperation, and I think, the poor kid. It’s hard to know where to drive when you’re just trying to fill up the time to talk, so I point the car toward the county park, where the Sidenberg River—it’s really not much more than a creek—flows down toward Lake Keating, polluted now with mud, algae, and leeches.
I stop the car in the parking lot, and in the near dark, I get out and sit down on the car’s left front fender so that I can soak up the atmosphere. Halloween used to be the gate between late fall and early winter, but with global warming, predictable weather has become unpredictable, and you might as well give up anticipating any meteorological events whatsoever. You can hear the gurgling of the river in front of us, and over there in the picnic area, some other teenagers and young adults have started a sort of campfire and are drinking beer and smoking dope. The skunky odor wafts its way toward us. No doubt they’re also doing edibles and shrooms and losing their minds in the general universal love. One of the girls laughs, a laugh like a throttled scream, as if she’s having visions.
And the fireflies! In October! Impossible but true. They’re coming out of the woods and are dotting the air with their fitful luminescence. They’re accompanied by the sound of crickets and the shouts of the stoner partygoers in the near distance. Joe has come out with me and is sitting on the right front fender. We’re both gazing off into the distance. This is the only way fathers and sons can talk to each other: if they’re looking at something together, over there.
“I remember a story about fireflies,” I tell Joe. “My father told me this story. I guess his father must have told him. It’s kind of a bedtime story. I haven’t thought of it for years. In the story, this girl and boy—I guess they’re siblings—escape from a burning house and flee into the woods, pursued by the ogre with no face and three legs, a monster in the shape of a walking slug. The monster has no eyes, but it feels its way forward. That was the part of the story that always scared me.
“The two brave children run deeper into the forest, and the trees regard them impassively. The trees have seen children before, running away from witches and wizards, dragons, and men intent on being murderers. The trees have seen it all.
“Night is falling. The three-legged ogre has given up and crawled back into its lair. But now the children are very deep in the woods, and they are lost. There is no path toward home. Like Hansel and Gretel, who left a trail of bread crumbs that the birds ate, they don’t know where they are. Then at twilight, the fireflies begin to appear. Somehow the children know that the fireflies will lead them to safety. Each firefly has a tiny light that appears briefly, on and off, like an airy floating point of light.
“In the story, the fireflies are like guardian angels, and the tale ends when the children are safe, led to the old woodcutter’s cabin, where they each have a bowl of porridge for dinner. The next morning, they find their way to the village, where the mayor praises them.”
“That’s the story?” Joe asks. “They eat porridge?”
“Yes, that’s it. The porridge is part of the story.”
“Jeez, Dad, it’s total bullshit. You liked that? Even as a story for kids, it’s bullshit.”
“Why d’you say that?”
“Because…the children, I don’t know, they’re…because nobody ever gets saved. Not really. Nobody’s ever saved.” He waits. “My opinion? They don’t get out of the burning house, for starters. If they do, the ogre eats them. If they get into the woods, they get…I don’t know, they get, um, lost, and they starve. The birds swoop down on them and, like, you know, vultures peck out their eyes and stuff. Anyway, even if they don’t get lost, the woodcutter is probably a pervert and rapes the girl. Maybe he rapes her brother too, icing on the cake. That’s the reality. That’s how it goes, these days. We’re living in contemporary times.”
My cellphone rings but I ignore it. “Well,” I tell him, “life doesn’t have to be like that.”
“Yes, it does,” Joe says, “because it totally is like that.”
I take a deep breath. Being fifteen years old was never easy and certainly isn’t now. “Trey says you’re leaving notes in your room and around the house.”
“Yeah, well,” Joe says, looking down at his hands. We can still hear the orgasmic laughs of the partygoers, a vicious madcap counterpoint to my son’s glum mood.
“They’re kinda like suicide notes, she says.”
“Well, they aren’t,” Joe says. “Just kidding, you know? But, I don’t know…a little, like this little portion of them, maybe ten percent? Or less? Trying something out. Maybe that part is true. Or could be. You shouldn’t worry about me, Dad. Unless you want to. If you want to worry about me, you can do that.”
“How come you’re feeling this way?”
“Have you ever been over to Mom and Burt’s? Have you even talked to Burt?”
“Well, not recently, no. Not as in ‘a conversation,’ I haven’t talked to him.”
“Come back Sunday and take me out somewhere,” my son says. “And maybe I’ll tell you.”
9
I have mentioned that my ex-wife’s current boyfriend, Burt, is a fan of the Navy SEALs, the Ohio State Buckeyes, R/Q Dynamics, bodybuilding, and deer hunting bow-and-arrow style à la Ted Nugent, which is not the sign of a high serviceable IQ. I have also noted that he once fell off a roof, another telltale clue to his behavior. Here’s a fuller picture, but note: you can skip over the following description if you know people like Burt, a guy who fits quite comfortably into the Mr. Asshole category. Just flip ahead a couple of pages after you’ve gone out to your kitchen for some popcorn and a beer, and the story will resume. Just to be fair, I should mention that I don’t like him at all and I find him somewhat repulsive. His full name, for the record, is Burtram Kindlov, a cruel misnomer. No kind love from him!
Have you ever been in the passing lane, gaining on another car but still at the speed limit, and someone comes up behind you in a pickup, tailgating three feet behind you, blinking his headlights and honking? That would be Burt or someone of the Burt-type.
Of course my ex-wife is with him now, so I’m not inclined to be gracious. She traded me in for him, smitten as she was, going all in and forgetting about the ninety-day warranty. Cheryl was always an impulse buyer. She proposed to me after our third date.
People talk these days about “toxic masculinity” and “testosterone poisoning,” a category from which I consider myself to be exempt, but Burt has apparently been schooled by the Marlboro Man—Marlboro is his brand of cigarettes, and he goes around smelling of rank tobacco smoke mixed with the usual odor he gives off. He has an old Ford F-150 that he doesn’t ever wash, while Cheryl drives a rusting Datsun. He goes maskless everywhere, claims to be resistant to all diseases because he drinks chaga tea sourced from mushrooms clinging to birch trees in Minnesota, and he listens to those nincompoops on the radio who spout off about evil liberals and licensed medical doctors. Needless to say, he’s also glued to the subterranean regions of the internet where he fills his mind with conspiracy cobwebs and other Mad Explanations, that endlessly renewable insanity. R. Stan Drabble is one spider spinning webs among many other busy spiders. Nevertheless, Burt has an imperturbable ignorance about the world and what people are really like. If you were to ask him where Italy is located on the globe, he wouldn’t know but would despise you for asking. Did I mention his hat? No. But you can imagine the hat. I don’t have to explain everything.
Given his intermittent employment, his carelessness, his mean streak, and his bad habits, Burt would be no prize to anybody, but here I have to be truthful and submit an important detail about him, which is that by any standard, he is exceptionally handsome. A prank of fate. I’ve known him since grade school—I’ve followed his career, such as it is. We’re the same age. Full disclosure compels me to admit he’s painfully good-looking, and despite the cigarette smoking, he has kept himself in shape, so that from high school onward he has had no trouble attracting girls and had no trouble attracting my ex-wife. He has the wide shoulders, the thick hands, etc. He was a wrestler in high school and acquired the signature cauliflower ears, but despite his unsightly ears, he has never been at a loss for female companionship—women habitually notice him and his deep voice and his cowboy musculature after he enters a room. You can demonstrate good manners to women and talk to them about the novels of Emily Brontë all you want, but even some of the educated ones will flip out when Burt is around. Flagrant male beauty gets their attention. They excuse themselves from your mild-mannered presence and soon are standing next to him, touching him on the arm, smiling and laughing. I don’t want to be crude, but you can see that look in their eyes: they want to fuck him without any apologies. It’s an animal reaction. Some women, the better ones, are exempt. Cheryl, however, was not.
And so they fall into bed with Burt, and then what happens? If you’re a guy, having any woman you want degrades your character. The whole idea of monogamy stops making sense. You treat yourself to just anybody. This leads to lying and subterfuge. The worst part is that you don’t have to make an effort to look nice, to be charming, to remember birthdays, to give presents and other tokens of affection. A handsome face and the muscles and the big dick are the passports to everywhere. That passport doesn’t expire until you’re middle-aged. Anyway, once you have the passport, you grow slovenly. You don’t have to write down their phone numbers because they’ll call you. The art of conversation? Forget it. You don’t need that. A few pleasantries, a ride around town in the truck, a stop at the Dairy Queen, and “Wanna fuck?” will do fine. You sit in the kitchen—Burt does this—and you eat the banana or the orange and throw the peel in the direction of the garbage, and if you don’t sink it, you leave the peel right there on the floor for others to pick up. Beer bottles and discarded protein shakes litter the house. A butter plate sits on top of the piano keys. The refrigerator door stays open for minutes at a time. The kitchen becomes a playground for mice. Even the flies in the house are coated with dust.
What I’m saying is, some women have a weakness for such characters. Guys like this don’t get married unless they absolutely have to. They may get cornered into it by a random pregnancy, but these days that stratagem rarely works. Occasionally Cupid’s arrow hits a Burt-type, but when that happens, it’s one for Ripley’s. Most of these men are as vain as beauty contest winners, and they spend hours in the gym when they’re not drinking Muscle Milk or watching TV openmouthed or cruising the internet or playing video games or are out in the woods killing innocent-bystander animals. R/Q Dynamics have (has?) taught Burt to take some responsibility for his actions, but he hasn’t made it up to full responsibility level yet, what they call “open-throttle individualism” enacted by people called “Autonomous Falcons.” These are falcons freed from their handlers, a.k.a. government bureaucrats and ordinary day-to-day authorities like the employees at the Department of Motor Vehicles. I used to wonder what Cheryl actually thought about having a faithless guy who does not love her sharing her bed every night, but all she ever said in explanation was “He’s a beast, and I want to tame him.”
