Authors: Daniel Buckman
“I can’t believe they’re playing this song,” she said.
“Go with it,” he said.
“I didn’t like it then.”
She turned down the volume and he heard the wind over the sad, growly singer. Ian Curtis was a put-on, she said. She’d talked about dancing in the aisles at Talking Heads’s concerts back in college, really throwing her arms above her head, and for twelve years he tried imagining it.
Mike first saw people scrubbing their windshields with green pads at a truck stop near Kimball. The insect guts darkened the glass like window tint, but his remained clean enough to see Susan’s reflection without spots shadowed on her face. They must have hit an odd stretch of air, he thought. Smiling guys with RVs stood upon stepladders and worked their elbows, watching Susan walk for the restroom, her hand squeezing her purse strap. Look at the ass on her, their faces said.
“You can’t get the bugs all the way off with a squeegee,” a man in a cowboy hat told him. “Not out here. Go get you some green pads at the Wal-Mart in Brownson.”
Mike nodded that he’d make do and the man shrugged his shoulders. He went looking for Susan because that morning she’d cried on a Texaco toilet seat outside Cheyenne, sobbing so hard her eyes were still swollen at noon. He’d stood outside the door, his shadow broken on a propane tank, asking her what she wanted from him. My eyes are all puffy, she’d said.
“Remember,” the man called out, “it’s the bugs’ world in Nebraska and we just live in it.”
Mike drove off and set the cruise at eighty-five and read the mileage sign for North Platte, Kearny, Omaha. Sure, Tex, he thought of the man. It’s probably just like you say.
Ogallala was a hundred miles away when the bugs came out of the white sky like spilled coffee. They stitched the windshield. He looked hard through the smears and heard them hitting while Susan searched the radio for a stronger station. He couldn’t see and the bug shadows spotted her cheeks. She scanned and listened for a half second, caring more about a clear signal than the music.
* * *
In Chicago, they went on dates again. Just the two of them. They were making steps, like they talked about in the mountains, and meeting at restaurant bars, the same places from ten years ago, an Italian place on Racine, or a Lebanese bistro far north on Clark. Then, they’d drunk martinis because people were doing it again, he Stoli, she Absolut, and laughed about inside jokes with friends they last knew had moved to Seattle. Lance was Heineken, then Bombay and tonic when he bloated. Elizabeth liked Cosmopolitans. It was the pretty glass, the faded red vodka. In those days, they were all just off work, the Loop or the near North Side, where women swung Coach bags and pigeon feathers fell in the puddles. They sang Nat King Cole songs with the jukebox and thought things were one big wave.
Tonight, Mike and Susan ordered their martinis and sat alone at Rico’s. The bar was clean, but scratched. She played with her olive stick. Mike wanted to tell her there wasn’t enough air in their apartment for two, and it was good they left the place to fill back up. Open windows, a hard wind, the curtains pushed to the ceiling. But she would only look at him, her eyes becoming wet. We were just in Colorado for two weeks, she’d say. Air isn’t the problem. Now, they sat where they once drank grappa like they knew something special, and said nothing about him becoming a cop. She was sure he’d pull the plug, that it was already an old idea he had of himself. You wait, he thought. I can’t lose in that world.
Mike watched the waiters watch the six o’clock news. There was a fire west on Harrison, around Cicero, an eight-flat lit up like a wedding party. Kids aped for the news camera.
“You think Lance and Elizabeth ever married?” he said.
“No. She left him for a doctor.”
“How do you know?”
She pointed to the restroom through a doorway, by a pay phone. Two busboys looked at her where they folded silverware into cloth napkins.
“We used to talk in there. She was scared Lance’s dreams were too tied up with him going out.”
“He wanted to design computer games.”
“She said he only ever had plans on bar stools beside you.”
“He knew what he wanted to do.”
“I bet the doctor dumped her after she left Lance.”
“Where’s this coming from?”
“That girl was like a monkey with men,” she said. “She always had her hand on a branch before she swung. One had to break.”
“You want to get a table?”
“You really thought Elizabeth was something.”
“Maybe we should finish our drinks here.”
“Whatever you want to do.”
“She was our friend.”
“He was your friend. Women make the best of being stuck together.”
Mike kept quiet and drank, letting the cold vodka numb his gums before he swallowed. He was happy Susan usually stopped herself before listing the things she endured to be his wife.
* * *
Later, he left Susan lying awake and ran the city dark with an open smile. He caught the raindrops in his mouth and sprinted between the rat-proof garbage cans while the garages dissolved from the rain. He felt good, he’d drunk light, and the shoes were taking the shock while he hit puddles behind used car lots and donut shops with chained Dumpsters. The clouds sopped up the city lights. He stretched his legs and he felt only the cold rain stinging his throat.
Back home, he stood in the bedroom doorway, sweat and rain wet. His wife lay in the TV light with the cat lying across her leg. When she’d first heard him, she started making sobbing noises, though now, she was done with that. He knew she’d tried crying, but stopped after her ducts gave no water. On their third date she’d cried as badly, telling him about her college abortion over vodka tonics and T-bones beneath the Sinatra painting at Rosebud on Taylor Street.
“Six miles in forty-one minutes tonight,” he said. His running shorts were stuck to his thighs.
Susan said nothing, her eyes sad and dry. He still found them beautiful, like chocolate syrup, the way he told his buddies after their first hook-up, but now, after twelve years, her brown eyes demanded an emotional admission he was afraid to stop paying because his buddies were all gone.
“Forty-one minutes,” he said again. “I’ll sleep through the police academy. Remember at Rico’s when we’d watch the fat trainee cops run down Racine?”
Susan was silent. Mike wanted to put his finger in her face, but he didn’t. She looked at the cat while she stroked its cheekbone. He knew he couldn’t touch his wife even if he put his hand on her mouth.
One day, he’d remind her they were from different towns, but the same Illinois with brown rivers and cornfields running to the sky. He needed to get that straight again, remind Susan of her limitations.
“I know Harvard accepted you senior year of high school,” he’d tell her. “You wrote an essay on Freud and dreams for a contest, then presented it to the Rotary Club in a long dress. You had slides of diagrams and spoke into a microphone. The bored, gray men sat in folding chairs with their legs crossed.”
Susan would shake her head. Her eyes might blear while her finger pointed at his nose.
“You have no idea,” she’d tell him. “There is no way you could know a thing.”
“The day the envelope came,” he’d say, “you saw the rain dance on pickup hoods parked among the clapboard houses. The gutters were high with muddy water from the flooded fields. You held the letter and watched the weather coming over the interstate, the paper flecking wet, knowing your mother would worry all night about the creek rising behind the house. You cried with closed eyes, alone beneath the willow tree, happy you could blame your wet face on the rain.”
“I didn’t see any of it. Not the way you say.”
Mike told his wife nothing. He only watched her look away and rub the cat’s ear between her thumb and forefinger. He knew they liked fighting more than understanding, and because of it, they’d forced each other away. She was there for the cat, not him, and he could feel good about that if he let himself. Either way, he’d jog different alleys tomorrow night, dreaming he could run until the dawn broke over the two-flat roofs, the morning light coming fast, chalky, then the palest blue.
2
Donald Goetzler stood by the long window while the rain sliced their reflected faces in the glass. Shapeless men and women lined out the conference-room door and took paper plates when they neared the food table. It was Goetzler’s retirement lunch, the regulation catered buffet on Weber Industrial Supply, the long trays brought in by Mexicans in red windbreakers with their names sewn on front. The secretaries got him a white cake from a supermarket bakery. He looked at his watch, a gold Rolex date timer, then back out the window.
Weber retired Goetzler with a phone call to set up the short meeting where he’d sign for his package: one year’s salary, a two-year consulting retainer, and the right to pay for group health insurance. What’s your timetable, they said. He held the phone to his ear. He pressed it close, then closer, until the voice sounded like no voice at all. A fax came in. The printer spat paper. He wished he’d been tougher.
Yesterday, when he cleaned out his cubicle, he threw away three million dollars’ worth of research, two years of sixty-hour weeks, inquiries into how they might get Ford and General Motors to buy their safety equipment and lightbulbs.
Shred it, they told him. We’re changing our focus.
They wanted to sell hammers and light motors to prisons, federal agencies, city water departments.
The secretaries in their floral dresses looked up from the buffet where they poured ranch dressing on carrot sticks. Ari Feldman was moving through them like a cocky house cat, his paper plate sagging from the pizza slices and the stuffed shells. He was fat, his loafer heels worn into an inside slant, his XXL oxford coming untucked from his khakis with the elastic waistband. They stared squint-eyed through their glasses, looking at Feldman and the emptied pizza boxes, while he stacked garlic bread upon two oatmeal cookies. They mouthed jerk and shook their heads. He worked in quantitative market research, and e-mailed classmates from the University of Chicago about his folk rock band, The Bagel Chips. He went back and got another paper plate because the grease was leaking and wiped his hand on a chair back. He then walked right up to Goetzler, half the pizza on his plate.
“Ed Marx got a better retirement package than you did,” he said.
Goetzler looked out the window.
“He got three years full pay and a five-year consulting deal,” Feldman said.
“They never call them back,” Goetzler said.
“They’ll call Marx. He was something around here.”
Goetzler looked at the sterno heating the stuffed shells. He’d stood next to some of the men at the urinals, but the women were floral dresses to him. In the window Goetzler saw that Feldman was still talking, his face blurred by the rain.
“Ed Marx got an IT degree at night before people even had the Internet. He knows trends.”
Feldman was taking pizza bites before swallowing his mouthful.
“That guy is far from done. Ed Marx will be the consultant of this industry.”
“You hear anybody talk about him since he left?”
“No.”
“You’ll get the call one day,” he said.
Ari Feldman started chewing very quickly. Goetzler could see his red wet teeth.
“You stayed in the army after Vietnam,” Feldman said. “I started ten years before you. I’ll be a director like Ed Marx.”
Goetzler pointed to the plate of pizza.
“But your ass won’t fit his seat,” he said.
Feldman looked away before Goetzler turned. They both watched the rain and the wind melt their reflections in the window. Feldman was burrowing his eyes into the glass while Goetzler smiled and looked at his gold Rolex date timer. He liked the way it slid from his shirt cuff. If he looked at the watch and nothing else, he could be very happy with himself and believe he got exactly what he wanted.
* * *
One morning in late June 1967, while the Officer Candidate School platoon crossed the monkey bars outside the chow hall, Donald Goetzler fell off for the last time. His hands were too small and he never got a good enough hold around the bars for his arms to take him across. He’d hold up the line. The cadets behind him, sweaty with momentum, kneed his backside. His blisters burst like opening eyes and he went down midway across. He knelt on all fours and the men’s boots kicked his head, knocking off his horn-rim glasses. He looked for them, patting the red sand, the grit impacting his bloody blisters. When the platoon filed into chow hall, Goetzler went to the aid station, where he had his palms cleaned, and two hours later stood before Major McCally with gauze on his hands.
McCally lit a cigarette and reclined in his oak swivel chair. He put his jump boots upon the desk and Goetzler saw himself reflected in the shiny leather, his hands wrapped like amputated stumps. The major held the cigarette between his fingers, his hand ready to karate chop. He was with the Twenty-fifth Division in the Pacific, and had an autographed picture of James Jones on his desk.
I knew him in Hawaii before Pearl, he’d say of Jones. I even knew the little dark-eyed queer he turned into Pruitt. But Jimmy Jones. That book shoved it up their asses and he married a looker who only jumped writers and then he makes a million. Good on him.
McCally won a battlefield commission in Korea, six years after winning the Distinguished Service Cross on Iwo Jima, but his glory road had stopped at an Officer Candidate School training command.
The major’s hair was cut close, flecks of gray upon the black. He looked at Goetzler with stiff blue eyes.
“They’re drafting some real no-hopers into the line divisions,” he said. “An infantry officer better be part lion tamer if he wants to make his mission in Vietnam.”
Goetzler looked down at the bloody gauze.
“Flat out,” the major said. “Your glasses are too thick. They’d steam up bad in-country. You’d get shot in the head. I’m transferring you to the MPs.”
“Yessir.”
“After this war, Goetzler,” the major said, “the army is going to be full of dope. I mean it. You get yourself a plainclothes assignment. You find some of that dope and put the shitbirds away. Get you a pension.”