Love & Darts (9781937316075) (5 page)

“It’s Harley’s
100
^th
though too. That could be it. Or just traveling.”

“The 100
^th
was last year.”

“Right.” I can’t eat egg salad sandwiches. Shit’s
nasty. “How’s their game?”

“Better than yours. What do you think about my egg
salad? Never made it before, but I had a craving.”

“Not bad. Needs to be on toast though.”

“Toast? I’ve never had egg salad on toast. I’ll try
it.”

He gets summoned to the other end of the bar. I pick
up a paper and suck on a green bean. I flip slowly through the
Journal Sentinel. After a while Judson wanders back and starts
washing glasses.

I hold up the paper, turn an article toward him so
he can see the headline and photo. “Did you see this about Kenny
Chesney and Uncle Kracker on Saturday? Bizarre.”

“Yeah, the lineup’s fucked this year. I used to know
more of the smaller bands. Now I barely care.”

We’re silent for a little while. It gets later. More
people start coming in. They fill up the bar around me and the
bartender gets busy. I read an article about zoning regulations. I
read another article about various parking tribulations for
Summerfest. I read part two in a three-part series about the zebra
mussel infestation in the Great Lakes and its damaging effects on
the ecosystem. I say to Judson, “Have you ever heard of an invasive
species?” But he doesn’t answer. I keep reading. The mussels come
from the Caspian Sea and other foreign ballast waters of oceangoing
ships that come to port in Chicago, Detroit, and Green Bay. They
make a hell of a mess of pipes apparently. I drink the High Life.
The wet bottle makes rings on the newspaper. The bikers settle up
and get on their way to wherever.

I move a coaster with two fingers like it’s part of
an air hockey game. I say to Judson, “Whatever happened with
Lacy?”

He rubs the back of his hand across his nose.

I’m hitting the coaster against the bottom of my
beer bottle wondering if he’s going to respond when he says, “She
decided to keep it.”

I look back at the red sand shovel left in the ice
maker. “You gonna marry her?”

“Who? Lacy? Fuck no. I’m not marrying Lacy. Why
would I want to deal with her shit for the rest of my life?”

“So what’re you gonna do?”

“Get a fucking lawyer, I guess.”

An hour goes by. Judson cuts the air conditioning
and has me open up the windows since he’s busy mixing mojitos for
some out-of-towners who had heard of them on “Sex and the City.”
They probably aren’t great mojitos, but the girls seemed content to
pretend. “They’re dirty with the satisfaction,” he mouths to me
while the girls giggle together.

I tilt my head back and smile in recognition.

“When you get a chance, bring me a little more of
this High Life, and those green beans. They’re great.”

He comes back my way, “I know. I grow the beans in
an empty lot next to my house then I pickle them here. I use white
wine vinegar, onion, garlic, about ten red chilies, some jalapenos,
rock salt, and pickling spice. Boil it up. Two weeks in the cellar
and they’re ready. My grandma used to make a pickle similar to it
with all sorts of vegetables but not quite as hot. But I love these
with a vodka or Bloody Mary. Nice offset for the flavors.”

“You should sell them to all these type of fucks,
folks you know. They’d give you a fortune for ‘em.”

“Not my style. I like the Ball Mason jars. The lids
especially. And I like the quiet morning making them couple times a
year. I want a tradition, not another job out of it.”

Someone puts some money in the old juke box. Jimmy
Cliff. Outside, a couple of guys tie a German shepherd to the stop
sign and come in for a game of darts. I drink two more beers and
watch the dog from the window as the evening moves on. The dog
turns his head watching people walk by on the sidewalk. Then he
settles down and falls asleep.

Conan has Emilio Estevez on as a guest. The TV’s
muted so I have no idea what brought Emilio onto a talk show. But
his chat washes by with the rest of it.

Then it is just me and Judson.

He says, “You think I’ll be a good dad?”

“You know you’re gonna be better than mine.”

He laughs.

I get off the stool, put the chairs up on the
tables, shut the windows, turn off the neon signs, and check the
bathrooms for anything vile while Judson cleans up the bar. He lays
the stainless steel tools out on a clean towel to dry.

He sets a shot up on the bar, “For your troubles,
man. Thanks.”

I drink the shot. “No trouble.”

He wipes the bar down. He wipes the tables down,
wipes the metal work down, tosses the old white towels into the
little stainless steel bar sink, fills the sink with cold water,
and adds a splash of bleach. He swirls the towels and rinses his
hands. “They’ll sit over night. You ready?”

Before their necks are broken they are beautiful.
These chickens live under a tent for a week in July. The heat wraps
up and around the sides of the tent and hangs thick in the middle.
The day is hot but it is hotter inside the tent even with its
shade. The bird cages are steel mesh wire. Not big, flimsy hexagons
but little, tight squares less than half an inch across. At the
places where the wires cross over each other the metal is built up.
There is a matte coating over it that hides the welds. Slow, scaly
feet move easily over the open-work wires but are careful,
intentional.

The fans are humming. They are old and
rattling—real metal fans that hang in four corners of the tent. The
air is heavy and even these industrial fans are ridiculous against
such weight. Smells circulate but air barely moves with the fans’
futility. It is so hot for the birds that someone, some thoughtful
caretaker, brought a plastic home-use fan. Everyone has a fan like
this. It’s the kind that sits on dingy golden carpet in hallways,
by sunken couches in living rooms, on cherry veneer tables beside
beds where love gets made, and on top of
endlessly-flashing-noon-‘cause-no-one-knows-how-to-reset-the-time
microwaves in disinfected kitchens. So, having seen such fans
everywhere else, it’s not so strange to see one in the poultry
tent. Someone has pushed the darkest brown button and pulled the
white peg up so the fan will oscillate on top of the middle row of
cages. As the fan directs and redirects its effort, pink, purple,
blue, and white ribbons sing out, fluttering enough to draw
attention to particular cages. Those wire rooms for the birds are
lined up as a single-file perimeter around the sides of the tent
and two deep back-to-back down the center. Observers flow as if
channeled through thick-walled ventricles of a heart.

Feathers move slightly as the fans push the
air. There are bits of feathers gathered down around the wooden
stilt-legs of the cages on the limestone gravel. There are feathers
in the fans. And feathers in the cages. And feathers in the taut
fraying jute ropes of the tent. Just downy white and gray pieces
mostly. The few good, big, pretty, golden feathers are picked up
quickly and swept away to shaft-stroking wonderlands with the
giggles of little girls.

The chickens pick up their bony, intentional
feet and slow-dance, sometimes even with flapping wings. They turn
and their feet seem backwards. Then, not forgotten, the bodies
turn. With short jolts, their heads betray nothing held in
confidence. The eyes focus and then turn away. Strangers read names
of the owners out loud and point, showing each other whatever they
see as important. We do it, too. “Come over here and look at this
one.”

For twenty years my mother has taken me and
my father to the fair. We go through the sheep barn. We go through
the cattle barns, dairy and beef. We look up at the names painted
on the rafters: names of friends, and brothers of friends, and
fathers of friends. Green paint on old white paint. We remember our
head, our heart, our hands, and our health. Sandals fill with dust
as we walk down the missing-lightbulb midway. We eat something
familiar because it’s only once a year. There is no anxiety for
goldfish swimming through food-color-dyed waters in dirty bowls and
no mortal fear for the cheap stuffed nothings everyone wants to
win.

We wander slowly through it all. It is hot,
July. We stop. I want to watch the boys throwing darts at a rainbow
wall of slack balloons. Because there is no sense of impending doom
for that child who paid for his three chances. He aims while my
father crosses his arms over his chest and stares. We feel the
imminent impact. We want the child to perform well, to win the
biggest, best prize: the huge stuffed tiger. But who can really
hope for so much? And what responsibility does this child have to
our family? None. So. We don’t really care if the child bursts
something nothing-filled. We don’t expect it. The first dart
glances off the pulverized wooden board and drops into a metal
collecting tray. He refocuses. Aims again. Then one, two steel
darts pop big yellow flopping balloons as we cheer, congratulate,
and smile. The child turns to us and smiles too. Dad walks on. We
follow.

It cannot be that this will kill him. I look
at my father, who stands with us eating a pork burger from the
Rotary Club’s tent. He watches the people walk by. He speaks to the
ones he knows. They don’t know yet, but we know. And still we smile
and say hello. We laugh at the round-bellied kid in the little red
t-shirt. And we ask the questions that you ask. But we don’t say,
“He’s dying.” We will have to soon enough.

We walk through the barns where my projects
once were. Barns I remember cleaning on cold spring days when you
shouldn’t really use a hose yet. Barns I remember hiding in. At
five and fifteen. They still smell the same. Hay. Dirt. Sunshine.
Cement. And Time. No one savors moments like this, moments when you
share personal speculations about who will probably win in all the
baked goods categories. So. We wander over to the show ring.

The hogs fill up the arena. We laugh at the
smallest children showing the comparatively huge animals. They rush
around the ring in their little Wranglers, boots, and tucked-in
dress shirts. But we don’t laugh at their age or stature. We laugh
in appreciation of their competence. They know everything about
showing hogs: shine them; tap them with the little whips; keep the
hogs between their bodies and the judges; move the animals along
quickly so their ears flop and their haunches bounce on coquettish
trotting hooves; and always keep both eyes right on that judge.

We all fall in love with one tiny skinny boy
in particular, because he’s so focused, so intent, so practiced, so
self-assured, so competitive.

He will grow up here, that boy showing those
hogs. Knowing how. But we all grew up here. Not Mom. Not Dad. But
the rest of us. The woman leaning over the fence grew up here. The
man sitting next to me grew up here. I grew up here.

And so I know everything that happens in
this ring. There are auctions. There are dances. There are obstacle
course races where greased-up kids hold greased-up watermelons and
go under bales of hay, through kiddie pools of water, and shimmy
around poles to ride scale-model tricycle-tractors towing stacked
cinder blocks on skids. Fair Queen pageants go on here where girls
win and girls lose. But today it is the hogs oiled up and glittered
in the ring looking very good and showing off.

The judging is over and there won’t be
anything else going on in the ring for a while. So we head back
towards the car but stop. Mom wants to walk through the poultry
tent. So we do. The birds are preposterous. They are amazing forms
of life. They are beautiful and clean and cocky. Before their necks
are broken.

She never asked to move here.

“The Buff Orpingtons are my favorite,” she
says. She holds his hand. And she knows that he’s dying. And she
knows the chickens are dying. And she was still careful to park in
the shade in July.