Onward Toward What We're Going Toward (16 page)

Chic stuck the end of the pen in his mouth. The motorcycle cowboy walked up to Mary. They whispered to each other, and the cowboy took out his wallet. Mary motioned to Chic. The motorcycle cowboy turned around. “You want him to hold the money?” he asked. Chic picked up his club soda and set it down hard; some of the soda splashed out and got on his hand. Then he gave
the motorcycle cowboy his best mean face.

“Jesus, what's wrong with him?”

The college kid, who was sighting up another shot, looked over at Chic, and Chic narrowed his eyes.

“Is he sick or something?” the motorcycle cowboy asked.

“I'm not sure,” Mary said. “He might be.”

It was the night after the Rivermen game, and Chic was tossing and turning in bed, thinking about Lijy's letter. She'd said she was going to tell Buddy “the day after tomorrow,” which had been today. After he had gotten home from work, each time the phone rang, his heart had started thumping in his chest. Sitting in the living room, he couldn't concentrate on
Truth or Consequences
and was zoned out when Bob Barker uttered his famous sendoff, “Hoping all your consequences are happy ones.” Chic knew that Lijy's news would bulldoze his brother's emotions, slay him, pull out his heart. He wouldn't be able to handle it if Buddy cried in front of him. At their father's funeral, Chic had heard Buddy sniffling, but couldn't bring himself to look over at him. Instead, he kept staring at the hymnal and bible in the book tray affixed to the pew in front of him. Tom McNeeley held their mother's hand, squeezing it and keeping it in his lap. At one point, Tom handed Chic a Kleenex, but it was Buddy, by then heaving and drooling and pretty much having an epileptic fit of sadness, who really needed one. Chic couldn't face that type of sadness again.

At two in the morning, Chic got out of bed. He hadn't gotten a single second of sleep all night. He walked down the hall and peeked into Lomax's room. The desk lamp was on, and Lomax was sleeping on top of his comforter, an explosion of papers on the floor, his briefcase open beside them. Chic tiptoed inside, shut
off the desk lamp, and closed his son's bedroom door behind him. He then went downstairs to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Filling up his glass at the sink, he looked out the window. Stillness. A slight winter breeze through the trees. Scattered porch lights. The streetlamp on the corner. Then, from the backyard, Chic heard something. A light tap-tap-tap, like someone fudging a finishing nail into place. He walked to the back of the house, to the bathroom, and looked out the window. Someone was struggling to climb over the fence. The person was hung up at the top, and couldn't shift his weight to get over. When the person tried to throw his body over, the toe of his boot tapped the fence's wood planks. Directly underneath this person was a rosebush—shriveled and dormant for the winter but still full of thorns. The person turned his head, and Chic saw his brother's worried face. Buddy was wearing a drab-olive World War I uniform, the kind with the brass buttons and puttees. Chic immediately recognized the uniform as their father's, who had served in the Thirty-Third Infantry Division (“Prairie Division”) in World War I. On the ground, upside down like a soup bowl next to the rosebush, was their father's doughboy helmet.

With a final burst of effort, Buddy fell into backyard, barely missing the rose bush. He scrambled and reached for the helmet, which he placed on his head, not bothering with the chinstrap. He then searched around for something else, and finally found what he was looking for: a butcher knife. What was he going to do with that? Before Chic could come up with an answer, Buddy was sneaking across the backyard and around to the front of the house. Chic went to the living room and flipped on the ceiling light. After a few seconds, Buddy periscoped up to peer in the window. Chic crossed the living room, and Buddy must have seen the movement because he quickly ducked back down. Chic opened the window. He could see his brother hunkering close to the wall, trying to hide.

“Buddy, what are you doing?”

He didn't answer.

“Buddy. I can see you.”

He looked up at him. “Lean out the window. I want to tell you something.”

“It's two in the morning. What are you doing? Why are you wearing that uniform?”

“Just lean out the goddamn window.”

Chic could hear by the tone in his brother's voice that it would be a good idea for him to play along. As soon as he leaned out the window, however, Buddy grabbed Chic by the pajama top and pulled him out into the front lawn. He then pinned him to the ground, holding both of Chic's arms above his head. So, this was it. This was how it was going to happen. Of all the ways, Chic wouldn't have guessed this—dragging him out his living room window, a butcher knife, his father's military uniform.

Buddy pressed the knife's point against Chic's nostril. “I could cut off your nose.”

“Buddy . . . ”

“Shut up.”

“Bud . . . ”

“Shut up. You commie. You ankle biter. Keep your goddamn mouth shut.” Buddy grabbed a handful of his own hair. Horrified, Chic watched him shear it off. Buddy then forced the sheared hair into Chic's mouth. “Buddy . . . don't . . . don't . . . stop it . . . I . . . please . . . ”

“Eat it. Eat it, you serpent-tongued snake.” He pressed the point of the knife into Chic's cheek, and Chic quit thrashing. A tiny bead of blood bubbled on his cheek. “Swallow it, you rat fink mother puss bucket pinko.”

Chic swallowed the hair, or at least tried to, but most of it stuck to the roof of his mouth and got hung up in his throat. When Buddy took his hand off his mouth, Chic spit and gagged.

Buddy rolled off of him and stabbed the knife into the ground. The way he was hunched over and shaking, Chic knew he was crying. He put his hand on his back, but Buddy sloughed it off.

“Don't touch me.”

“I'm sorry, Buddy,” Chic said.

Buddy wiped his eyes. They were blown out, blazing with pain. Chic remembered a family photo shoot. Their mother had paid a photographer to come over to the house. Chic was five or six years old, and their mother dressed him and Buddy in matching tweed suits. Their father wore his military uniform with the overseas cap. He'd spent all morning polishing the boots, and Chic had watched him sit on the bed and wrap each of his calves with puttees. For the photo, Chic sat on his father's knee. Buddy stood next to him. Their mother stood behind their father, her hand on his shoulder. Chic remembered that the uniform smelled like mothballs and that his father kept pulling at the collar and complaining about how tight it was on his neck. During Chic's entire childhood, the photo hung on the wall going up the stairs. In his memory, it still hung on that wall.

“It was a mistake, Buddy. I made a mistake.”

“She's pregnant. Did you know that? Of course you knew that.”

Chic put his hand on his brother's shoulder. He wanted Buddy to know he was going to help him get through this. Buddy sloughed it off, again. Then he pulled the knife from the frozen ground, picked up the doughboy helmet and walked away, down the street toward the corner streetlight, the helmet under his arm.

“Wait a second,” Diane said. “I'm confused. Why did you let him believe you slept with Lijy?”

“Because of what happened in the kitchen.”

“The kitchen?”

“I told you.”

“You didn't tell me about the kitchen.” Diane put her hands
on her hips. She knew something like this was going to happen. Ever since the wedding reception, she knew Chic Waldbeeser wasn't the man she'd thought he was. He said he wanted a normal life, she heard him with her own two ears, and then, he goes off and . . .

He told her everything, right down to the detail that he kept his socks on and his penis worked its way out while he was humping the air. “And that's what happened in the kitchen.”

“Oh my God!”

“I'm not happy about it either. Trust me. In fact, it was embarrassing.”

Lomax cracked his bedroom door open. He eyed his father, then his mother. He had a look on his face like he'd eaten something sour.

Diane looked at Chic. “Great. Lomax heard you. He knows that you tried to have sex with Lijy.”

“Lomax, buddy, I didn't have sex with Aunt Lijy. I just told my brother I did. And, yes, at one time, a long time ago . . . ”

Lomax stared at him. He put his hands over his ears.

“I can't believe this is happening.” Diane's bottom lip quivered.

“Lomax. Listen to me. Take your hands off your ears. Let me explain. I'm doing the right thing here. Uncle Buddy is my brother, and he's in a lot of pain. He was crying last night, and Lijy, Aunt Lijy, remember the way she was acting at the hockey game? Well, she—as you heard—she made a mistake, and I'm worried about Uncle Buddy and to help out, because it's the right thing to do, I told him that . . . wait. Diane. Don't. Not the bathroom. No.”

She slammed the bathroom door and locked it. Chic looked at Lomax. He wheeled his briefcase toward the stairs.

“I didn't sleep with Aunt Lijy, buddy. Someday, you'll see. When you have a brother, you'll see. This will all make sense.”

Lomax pulled the briefcase down the stairs.

“Being an adult is hard, Lomax. You're going to see this someday, and you're going to think back on this day and you're
going to realize that your dad was doing the right thing.”

“I'll be in the car,” Lomax yelled, slamming the front door.

From the bathroom, Diane said, “I hope you're happy.”

“No. I'm not happy. This isn't how I expected this to go.”

“And how did you expect it to go?”

“Maybe with a little more understanding. I'm trying to help my brother.”

“Let me get this straight, Chic. You wanted to sleep with your brother's wife but you didn't because she didn't want to sleep with you. So you told your brother that you slept with her because you want to help him.”

“Right.”

“How is wanting to sleep with his wife helping him?”

“I feel guilty about that. I told you. That's part of the reason why I told him I did. But I didn't sleep with her.”

“You wanted to and you told your brother you did.”

“Because I wanted to help him and I felt guilty.”

“She wouldn't sleep with you because she loves your brother. That's what she told you, even though she went off and slept with another man.”

“She loves him. I can show you the letter. I believe her. She made a mistake. People make mistakes.”

“Would you or would you not have slept with her?”

“I don't want to sleep with her. Not anymore.”

“But would you have?”

“Honestly?”

“Yes, honestly, Chic.”

“I know it's wrong, but . . . I can't believe I'm going to say this. I'm sorry. But—what? Diane? Don't do that . . . ”

She shrieked a high-pitched scream that lasted ten or fifteen seconds. Even after screaming, Diane didn't feel better. She looked at the closed bathroom door and heard him on the other side, breathing. She didn't want to be hearing him. She didn't want to be anywhere near him. She wanted to go back in time to
ten minutes ago when she was waking up and Chic was sitting on the edge of the bed next to her and said he had to tell her something. She knew by the way he was looking at her, by the way he put his hand on her leg, that what he was going to say wasn't going to lead anywhere good. So she tried to get away from it. She threw back the covers and got out of bed and went into the hallway, but he followed, asking her to stop, asking her to listen to him. In the hallway outside of Lomax's bedroom, she turned to him, and in turning to him, she knew that this was it; this was the moment when everything changed, when he was going to reveal to her things that she didn't want to know, things that were better left buried where she couldn't know they existed. When he began telling her what he'd done, her ears began to ring, her whole head buzzed and she felt woozy, her whole world wavered, the carpet beneath her feet appeared to be rolling, the walls closing in on her. She wanted to hold up her hand and tell him to stop, to quit talking, not to tell her. She didn't want to hear it; it would be better if she just didn't hear it.