Onward Toward What We're Going Toward (10 page)

“Sorry.” Green sucked a sip of vodka from his straw.

Eight Ball went back down on his shot, eyeing it up. He hit the cue ball with draw so that when it struck the fourteen and knocked it into the corner pocket, it reversed direction, as if it were on a string, and rolled backward so that it was in position for his next shot, the ten in the side pocket.

“Nice shot.” Green turned around. “You got any aspirin, honey?” he asked the bartender.

She ignored his question, engrossed in
Days of Our Lives
.

“Excuse me. Do you have any aspirin?”

“There's a gas station down the highway sells aspirin,” she told Green without looking away from the television.

A few minutes later, the pool game was over (Eight Ball won), and the kid took a stool next to Green and ordered a Miller Lite. The bartender got one from the reach-down refrigerator and in one fluid motion, cracked off the cap and set the bottle down on a coaster, then went back to staring at the television. The kid poured his beer into his tiny glass.

“What are you doing in a place like this?” Green looked the kid up and down, taking in his pink shirt and acid-washed blue jeans and flip-flops.

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“Fair enough. My wife works up the road at the Pair-a-Dice. I just dropped her there. Thought I'd get a drink.”

“At eleven in the morning?”

Green shrugged. “What can I say? I was thirsty.”

“This is the only place you can play pool for money. Only place I know. I'm Seth, by the way.” He held out his hand.

“Nice to meet you, Seth.” Green wasn't sure if he should give his name. He paused for a second, and decided not to give it. “So, Seth, you a gambler?”

“I like winning money.”

“You a basketball fan?” Behind Seth, Eight Ball was putting quarters in the pool table. “So, who do you like tonight? Chicago or Utah? Chicago is giving up three points.”

“You a bookie?”

“You a cop?”

“Do I look like a cop?”

“Do I look like a bookie?”

“Not really. Not like a bookie from around here. I wouldn't really know, though. I used to bet with a guy who lived on my dorm floor, freshman year. I haven't in a while, though.” Seth took a drink of his Miller Lite. “What's the over/under?”

“Bet a winner. That's where the true heart is. Chicago or Utah? Chicago's giving three points.” Green stole a glance at the television. The
Days of Our Lives
theme music was playing, and the credits were rolling. “Tell you what, Seth . . . ” He motioned with his head toward the front door.

Seth made a confused face. Green leaned in and whispered, “Meet me in the parking lot in five minutes. We'll talk lines or over/under. Whatever you want to bet.”

“Why don't we . . . ” Seth motioned toward a hallway that led to the bathrooms. At the end of the hallway was a door that went out to a deck with tables and a view of the Peoria skyline across the river.

“In the parking lot. Five minutes. I'll be in the minivan.” Green slipped a five-dollar bill under his empty vodka glass. “Barkeep, honey.” The bartender looked at him, and Green was positive she'd been crying. “Thanks for your hospitality.”

In the parking lot, Green climbed into his minivan. His head was pounding and the corner of his vision seemed to waver. But he wasn't going to let a headache stop him. He was close to his first transaction, and it hadn't been all that hard; it was only a matter of breaking the ice and getting the person, the booker—was that right, booker? er, no . . . the bettor, yeah, the bettor—getting
the bettor to start talking. Green opened the glove compartment and took out a bottle of Tylenol. He dry-swallowed two capsules and leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He hadn't felt like this, like a man, since he'd joined a gym the month after Jane died. While he strained through his reps, grunting, the complimentary trainer who that came with his six-month membership shouted, “Be a man. Come on. Be a man. Pump it out.
Pump it out!”
He was being a man again. He flexed his bicep and felt the hard bulge.

After a few minutes, Seth came out of the bar. He scanned the parking lot, spotted the minivan, opened the passenger-side door, and hopped in. He took five twenties out of his hip pocket and told Green he wanted to bet the Jazz. “I like Karl Malone.”

“Utah's getting three.”

“I'm a dog bettor. I like underdogs.”

Green reached under the seat for his ledger. Bending over sent a jolt of pain up his left arm, through his neck, and into his left eye like someone had stuck a hotwire to the back of it. “Jesus Christ, I got a headache.”

Lomax's earliest memory was of a long-haired, red-lipped being who picked him up and said high-pitched incomprehensible things into his face after he finished sucking what the long-haired, red-lipped being stuck in his mouth, and a pudgy-cheeked being with a deep voice, who stuck its head into his vision every time the long-haired, red-lipped being laid him down in a room that looked like it looked when he closed his eyes. The pudgy-cheeked being said incomprehensible things for long periods of time and gave him rectangular items whose corners he liked to stick in his mouth and gnaw on. After a while, some
of the incomprehensible things began to be comprehensible; he learned that the long-haired, red-lipped being was his mother and the pudgy-cheeked being was his father, and that his mother liked to say, “I love you and Daddy loves you and Grandma and Grandpa von Schmidt love you and Grandma Waldbeeser loves you.” Although he'd never been held by Grandma Waldbeeser, his mother sometimes put a picture in front of his face and said, “Grandma Waldbeeser. She's in a place called Florida with a man named Tom McNeeley.” Then his mother would touch his belly and say, “Goo-che-goo-che-goo,” and his father would stand behind his mother mumbling something about Grandma Waldbeeser not being something something something and storm out of the room.

Since his run-in with Sheriff Hewitt, Chic had been a good guy. Anytime he started thinking about Lijy, he would wash his hands with hot water. Some days, he washed them seventeen or eighteen times, and as a result, they became dry and chapped. But it worked; he rarely thought about Lijy. Instead, his mind skipped to thoughts of his brother out on the road selling coins, and to his father, Bascom III sitting in the living room, staring out the window. His brother and father were one and the same, pretty much. Chic had a sense that something was wrong with them, like they were bearing crosses of infinite sadness. Maybe he had the cross, too, but Chic carried his differently. His cross was one of infinite denial. Push everything to the back of the mind. But he couldn't always do that because his mind often went in directions he couldn't control, though he tried. Oh, did he try. The worst thing was denying his feelings. He did everything he could not to feel. Do not feel. Feel nothing. Avoid feeling at all cost.
Even when doing something that should evoke the epitome of feeling, the penultimate of feeling, the zenith of feeling, the top of the feeling mountain, like kneeling next to his son's crib and looking over the top rail down on the sleeping boy on his stomach, sucking his thumb, Chic did not allow even the slightest, even the tiniest bit of feeling to wedge itself under the door that he'd closed on his emotions. But one evening, rubbing his son's back while shushing him to sleep, Chic tried to feel something. If he was going to feel something, this was the time. Right now. He was going to concentrate and feel what he was feeling while he rubbed his son's back. And what he felt . . . he felt . . . what did he feel? He tried harder. He felt . . . he felt like he was wearing a diving suit, one of those heavy, brass-helmet diving suits with an oxygen hose that uncoiled upward toward the water's surface. In his diving suit, he was suspended in the water, floating. There was no sound. No smell. No feeling. Nothing. Just him inside a heavy diving suit, protected from everything. Even when rubbing his son's back and shushing him to sleep.

Lomax grew up quickly, too quickly, and filled out to be a roundish boy, not quite fat, but not skinny, either. Even though the elementary school fashion of the time was slacks and a button-up shirt, he dressed like a college professor, with a tweed sport coat and a bowtie. When he was just seven, he won the Jefferson Elementary spelling bee. After he spelled the last word correctly—
bildungsroman
—he ran off the stage and demanded that his second-grade teacher, Mrs. Nelson, and the other students, who looked at Lomax like he was some sort of space creature, call him Dr. Lomax.

Lomax carried a leather briefcase full of his great-great-grandfather's
notebooks and unsent letters. The letters were written in German and addressed to Basom's parents, but for some reason, a reason no one knew, they had never been sent. When he passed away, he willed them to his son, Bascom Jr., who never read them (since he didn't know German), and before he passed away, he willed them to his son, Bascom III, who set them in the basement on a shelf next to some other not-worth-mentioning items to collect dust. Not long after his father's suicide, Chic found the box and took it up to his bedroom. He picked through the letters (there were over a thousand) and stared in bewilderment at the strange language and sloppy penmanship. A few days after Lomax's seventh birthday, Chic, for some reason, remembered the letters and dug them out of the attic and gave them to his son. Chic wasn't sure why he had given the letters to Lomax—it just seemed like a fatherly thing to do.

Being only seven, Lomax was too short to carry the briefcase properly, so for a time he dragged it behind him. At some point, he grew tired of dragging it (the constant dragging damaged the briefcase), so he took the rear wheels and axle off his Radio Flyer wagon and affixed them to the briefcase to create a contraption that predated the wheelie suitcase Brooks Walker would patent in 1976. Here's the thing: even at the young age of seven, Lomax's fuse had been lit. He had a destiny. He'd found the book
Middleville, Illinois: Our Town, Our Lives
,
Our Story
and seen the pictures of R. S. Archerbach and his sons. He wanted to be pictured in a book one day.

Chic, on the other hand, wanted his son to be like every other red-blooded American boy. He tried to get him to watch Cubs' games on the television, replicating Jack Brickhouse's famous “Hey-hey,” home run call, but Lomax just sat on the couch ignoring the television and writing in a notebook. Chic also bought his son a baseball glove. Lomax, however, thought the glove was some sort of hat and put it on his head and sat down on his bedroom floor and opened the briefcase. “No, no,” Chic said. “It's a glove.” He slipped it on his own hand and smacked the palm with his fist. “A baseball glove.”