Best Boy (22 page)

“They're really old, and they're also kind of clients of mine.”

“Clients,” I said.

“Well, not exactly, but they've got their retirement savings tied up in the equities department of a firm I steered them to.”

“Good,” I said.

“For me it is. I brought them in and got a finder's fee. But I like them, actually. They're sturdy old folks with good politics.”

When my brother said someone had “good politics” it meant they agreed with him that the world was mostly in trouble.

“It's nice to have someone carrying on the family tradition,” he said and laughed.

I knew what he meant. He meant the tradition of Daddy arguing and fighting a lot about “politics” with dinner guests. Daddy read the paper carefully and he liked to talk at the table in a raised voice. Politics was mainly what he talked about. Once my Momma told me that they were both “socialists” and that's why he argued so much. She said I shouldn't tell anyone. I never did.

“Sometimes I think it's a good thing to die with at least a few of your dreams intact. The old man would have been amazed to see how every single one of his hopes for humanity went into the shitter. Workers of the world unite! As if!” Nate laughed and then his face grew serious. “But let's talk about money,” he said.

“Okay.”

“You probably didn't know this, but SSI only pays the basics. All the gravy, the trips to the arboretum, your excursions, the group overnights—that comes directly out of your little bro's savings.”

“Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

We continued walking down Main Street while I kept noticing how the buildings had different, newer signs on them but the shapes underneath were the same as when I was a boy.

“Of course I do it gladly. It's what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm happy to be doing it. You're my brother, after all, my one and only.”

There was a silence.

“Todd,” he said.

“When can I see the house?” I said.

“The what?”

“The house,” I said. “When can I—”

“Jesus.” He shook his head and gave a small laugh. “And to
think I actually thought I might get a grateful reaction out of you, if even for a split second. You'll see the house, and soon.”

We were now entering the “old city” part of Grable. There were fewer houses and they were set farther back from the street. The shops were Tayman's Deli and Rick's Chinese and the One Hour Laundromat. Nate suddenly said:

“By the way, just to set things straight, you know I
did
try to get you out here many times over the last years, and Beth was just a pill about it after the incident. You do know that, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “But do you think I can see the house tonight?”

Nate said nothing but shut his eyes and rubbed them hard with his hands for several seconds before he next spoke.

“Would you like to take a train ride?” he asked.

“Yes, I would,” I said, “very much.”

We were standing near the train station. The town of Grable is a small town that is connected to larger towns by roads but there are also trains. I love trains. Trains are safe because they always know exactly where to go.

“Can we go on the Green Gauge?” I asked.

The Green Gauge railroad wasn't a real train. It was an open car with a big steam locomotive that went back and forth a few miles on a track when we were boys together.

“That one's long gone, I'm afraid,” my brother said. “But we can take the commuter train to the next station and then back again. How'd you like that?”

“Great!” I said.

My brother went up to the ticket window and bought tickets. Then we went and stood on the platform.

“Sometimes I forget how you really are,” he said. “But seeing you here makes it all come back.”

“How do you mean?”

“I have a lot on my plate right now, Todd. Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“It means I'm kinda tapped out, exhausted.”

“Sorry.”

“I know none of this really matters to you, but when a man is like that the last thing he needs is—”

But I couldn't hear the rest of what he said because a booming wave of sound came suddenly from behind a curve in the tracks and grew quickly into a train that stopped itself with a hiss in front of us and unfolded stairs out its side to the ground. It was only three cars and none of them was a locomotive. This made me sad because I wanted to see the elbowing rods of steel that push the wheels. Also I wanted to see the faces locomotives make of personal effort like whales that shoot steam out a hole on the top of their heads.

“Where's the locomotive?” I asked.

“In a museum,” said my brother, “with a lot of other things. Come on.”

I followed him up the stairs into the train. It was mostly empty and we got on and took seats for ourselves. The cars started with a screech which frightened me but then they began moving more quietly past the backyards of houses and of people sitting in those yards at small tables. None of these people in their yards looked at us as we went by. Some of them stood in front of grills with long metal forks in their hands. From these grills smoke rose steadily. We went by a house that had a round blue pool in the backyard. We went by a house that had a car parked on the back lawn with four flat tires and another house with a big window that framed a woman holding a spoonful of something towards someone you couldn't see.

Finally the train left the houses behind and entered a long straight section where it began to speed up while making its metal sound of eating the rails. It blew its whistle at intersections. It was going faster and faster. The view out the window was beginning to blur. This was the part I especially liked because each time it happened I thought the train might lift off the rails and maybe, finally, fly into the sky.

I wanted to be on that train. A special smile came onto my face. The train was going even faster. You could feel the future pressing gradually into your body as the train kept accelerating past the way everything stayed the same. I wanted it to leave the rails and head into that future. I wanted it to beat gravity and become gradually weightless as it flew directly towards the sun. The train went faster still. I made fists of my hands and crouched forward. Perhaps this would be the time it happened. Perhaps I could leave and never come back. But then the train began slowing down for the very next station and I was returned to having the same heavy, identical body as before and the disappointment was large. It was very large.

“What's a matter, Todd?” he asked, looking at me and frowning.

“Nothing,” I said, which was a lie.

THIRTY-ONE

R
ON
S
ALOMON SWUNG OPEN THE FRONT DOOR OF
the house and stuck out his old man's face. At the center of that face were lots of very white teeth.

“Welcome!” he said, pushing open the screen door of the house.

“Well, good afternoon!” said my brother.

“Hi, Ron,” said Beth, “and thanks for being so flexible on timing.”

“The pleasure's all mine,” said Ron. “And you're Todd, if I'm not mistaken, right?”

“The man himself,” Nate said as Ron showed even more of his teeth and held his hand out to me. I looked over his head and shook.

“Hello!” I said, but maybe my voice was too loud from my excitement because I could feel my brother lean away from me.

“Glad to meet you,” said Ron, “and I hear you've come a long way to see this place.”

“I used to live here! It was my house!” I said.

“So I understand. Well, it's a very special house and we love it. Whyn't you come right in and I'll give you the tour? Elsie is at a church event but she sends her regards.”

“Elsie's so great,” said Beth.

My brother made a gesture that meant I was supposed to enter the house. I stepped forward into the front hallway but almost immediately stopped, remembering. Just like in town, everything around me was covered in new things but the older shapes below them made the memories come at me in rushes of feeling.

“Authentic Valencia tiles,” Ron Salomon was saying as he pointed with his old, spotted hand at the floor in front of us but suddenly my father was running down the stairs after me out of the past and I could hear the thuds of his feet making sounds inside my head that were louder than the words being said in front of me. He made the low dog growl in his chest as he reached for my collar and yanked me backwards forty years.

“Not this time, damn you!” my father hissed in my ear.

“Elsie's a whiz at finding this kind of stuff,” Ron said.

“If you try to run again,” said my father as he shook me in long, regular waves that began at my collar and went all the way down to my feet, “I'll cut your legs off at the knees.”

“She's really got a fabulous eye,” said Beth.

“That's lovely of you to say,” said Ron Salomon as my father began dragging me down the hall to the living room, where he often did his hitting.

I knew why my father was so angry. A minute earlier I'd dropped a telephone on his head while he'd been sleeping on the sofa. It was a black, heavy phone and Momma had said, “A big strong boy like you can bring the phone on the extension
cord to your father, the call's for him.” He'd been lying on the couch with his eyes closed and his mouth open. As I came up to him with the phone in my hands I'd stopped for a moment to look at him while he slept. Things swam back and forth under his eyelids. His lips opened a little more to let breath out. His nostrils went deep into the darkness inside his head in a way that scared me. The heavy phone had two pieces, one with the dial and one that you talked into. From the part you talked into I suddenly heard a tiny voice say, “If he knew what was good for him, he'd drop everything right now.” I let the phone go and it fell on his face.

“Over here, you guys,” Ron Salomon said, “is a planter filled with stuff we got from San Miguel de Allende. The native artists are called
artesanias
.”

“How beautiful!” Beth said. “My girlfriend Mindy collects very similar stuff from the Yucatán.”

“Elsie is the decorator,” said Ron. “Me”—he shrugged his shoulders—“I'm just the patron.”

“Todd?” my brother said to me.

“Yes?” I said.

“Ron asked you a question.”

“What?” I said. I was confused. The last thing I'd heard was Ron talking about his wife. Then I'd stopped hearing and started remembering.

“It's okay,” said Beth gently. “Ron was just asking if you'd like some lemonade.”

“Yes, I would, please. Can I have a straw?”

Ron went and got my lemonade which he gave me in a tall glass that I sipped through a straw as we continued walking through the house. He showed us the kitchen which didn't look at all like what I remembered and then we entered the living
room where all the bookshelves and paintings and little plates and tiny statues that had been there when I was a boy were gone. Instead there was a single long couch and a very large black flat television hung on the wall.

“We like the uncluttered look,” Ron Salomon was saying, “and that fancy new television is damn sharp in HD mode. On the other hand, I'm at the age where I like a little soft focus.”

My brother and Beth laughed while I noticed that the other thing gone from the room was the Knabe concert grand. This was a piano shaped like a giant lying-down harp. Momma pressed the keys of it to magically make clean, perfect rooms of feeling in the air. Mozart was a room. Bach and Beethoven were rooms also. Each of these rooms had different looks to them but all of them were safe like bathrooms because everything in them was exactly where it was supposed to be as far as you could hear in every direction. But if Momma made even a little mistake in her playing I'd yell at her to please, please go back to the very beginning because if not something terrible would happen and the ceiling of the beautiful room would fall on my head.

“Want me to show you the upstairs?” Ron Salomon said.

“No!” I said loudly.

Everybody stopped and turned to look at me.

“Can I see the crawl space?” I said.

Nate made a sound not quite like a laugh. “My brother,” he said, “is a little obsessed about this place.”

Ron Salomon scratched his head.

“Crawl space?” he said.

“You sure you wanna go there?” Nate asked me.

“Yes.”

“The crawl space,” Nate said to Ron, “is under the stairs,
where we used to play Army when we were kids and my parents stored clothes and things. I wasn't actually living here when this house was sold so I'm not sure what's there and what's not.”

“That space?” Ron Salomon said. “I think I poked my head in once and thought, I gotta call an exterminator and a guy to help clear out all that junk and get it sealed up tight, but I never did. Right this way, everybody.”

He turned and walked us down a hall and then he opened a door and we went down the stairs while he flicked a switch.

The basement room was changed like everything else in the house. The concrete floor was covered in a black rubber that quivered under your feet and the fluorescent lights were gone. It didn't look at all like the place where Momma had taught piano to little children seated on the floor who beat on homemade drums with boiled chicken bones in their hands. Her fingers pushed among the keys and the music came out of the upright piano that was called a “spinet,” and she said, “Very good, boys and girls, but concentrate on the beats of the song that are like railroad ties holding the tracks.”

I crossed the floor towards the place on the wall where I could still see the faint outlines of the crawl space underneath the paint. When I got to it I touched it with my finger.