Kids These Days (25 page)

“It's nice,” Mid said.

“What about you?” he said to me.

“I think so, too,” I said.

“So how about it? You want one?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Why the hell not?”

“I have tables,” I said.

“I don't get your meaning,” he said. “You have tables.”

“I'm not meaning anything,” I said.

Pete Brett whispered something to himself I couldn't hear, and he looked from me to Mid and then back again. “Well, at least take a look at this, would you?” He put the beer leg back in the truck, reached in behind the seat again, brought out a different leg, naked this time. He pointed it at me foot-first. “Feel that heel,” he said.

“Why me?”

“Come on, man, feel it!”

“I don't want to,” I said.

He swung it to Mid. “How about you? You want to feel it?” Mid didn't move. He stared at Pete Brett, who held the leg out in the air. We had fallen into something. You're not involved, Mid kept telling me. Except here I was in this driveway. Pete Brett flipped the leg around and rubbed the heel himself. “Y'all are missing out,” he said. “Feels just like a real heel. Just like the real damn thing.” He turned it back thigh-out to show us a hole drilled into it and threaded for a bolt. “Now why don't one of you gentlemen tell me what that is?” he said. “Take a guess. You'll love it.”

Neither of us said anything.

“Guess,” Pete Brett said again.

I said, “I don't know.”

“It's for truck drivers, man! For gearshifts! I'm gonna sell these in truck stops. They'll take off their gearshifts, screw this baby back on. Then they can drive down the highway, take hold of that heel, shift her through her paces, move on down the line.”

A dog barked a few houses away. I imagined every truck on the highway with a naked leg gearshift, and a warehouse of legless mannequins, all the bodies left over from the production of these things. Mid said, “You'll make a million dollars.”

“I know it!
Now
you wanna feel it?”

Mid said, “I'll still take a pass.”

“I don't get why y'all won't just feel it.”

“How are you for funding?” Mid asked. He was getting his feet back under him.

“How am I for what, sir?” He kept saying sir.

“Start-up. Are you selling them yet?”

“I got a plan, if that's what you're asking.”

“What is it?”

Pete Brett's eyes seemed to pull back into his head. “I wouldn't go sniffing around what ain't yours, if I was you.”

“That's not what I meant,” said Mid. “I was only—”

“You know what, dude? I think I see what you two are about. You came in here to steal my shit. Well, guess what? I got a lawyer. We got a patent pending. I got—” He blew his nose out on the ground, wiped his face with his wrist. “I got a fucking business model, is what I got.”

“All I meant was maybe we could help you out. Investment-wise. I'm not here to take anything from you.”

“I don't need your help, OK, sir? And I don't think I'm going to need to sell you my truck, either.” He got up close to Mid. “Plus I still say I know you assholes. I recognize you.” We never should have gotten out of the car. I should have made him take me home. Pete Brett said, “How about you two pissants get back in your little candy corn Batmobile and get the fuck off my property?”

“It's alright,” Mid said, trying to calm him down. “We're OK here.”

Pete Brett shook the leg at him. “You think we're OK? You're gonna be the person who says so? Get this: I will
find
your ass. Do you understand what I'm saying? I will come and find you. And how about you not talk to me like I'm your pet?”

“I apologize,” Mid said. “You don't need to get upset.”

He got very calm. “Don't say that,” he said. “I am not upset.”

“This is a simple misunderstanding,” Mid said.

He turned to me. “And I do know you. I remember you.”

“I'm somebody else,” I said. “You've got the wrong guy.”

“I don't get upset,” Pete Brett said.

“We believe you,” Mid said.

In one smooth motion, Pete Brett yanked the leg up into the air, and then brought it down, heel first, into the Camaro's windshield. A shatter-star the size of a dinner plate formed in the glass. “
That
'
s
the kind of thing that could happen if I did get upset, though,” he said. “That was a little demonstration. Did you catch that? You want me to play that back?”

“No,” Mid said, quietly. He bit on the insides of his lips.

A woman came out onto the front porch. She said, “Pete, time to come inside.”

Pete Brett stared at Mid. “How about you give me a thousand dollars, you little fuck.”

“Give you what?”

“A thousand dollars. You'd like me to go in the house, right?”

“I wouldn't like anything.”

“I want a thousand dollars.”

“Forget it,” Mid said.

Pete Brett hoisted the leg again, and then whipped a kind of uneven baseball swing through the driver's-side mirror, knocking it loose. The mirror bounced off the window and hung from the side of the car by its wires. Mid didn't flinch. I wasn't sure he believed what was happening. I wasn't sure I did. The summer before you were born, I thought. Pete Brett looked at us, at the leg. He wasn't breathing heavily at all. You would have otherwise thought he was fine. “Who's next?” he said. He lifted the leg again, seemed to be lining Mid up. I would have planned some move if I could have made my brain work, could have thought of anything that might stop or slow what was going on. The woman on the porch said, “Pete.”

Mid produced a wad of cash from his pocket, counted off several fifties, held it out. “Here,” he said.

“That's not a grand,” Pete Brett said.

“It's what I'm willing to give you.” Even now he was making a deal.

Pete Brett tugged on one ear. “I don't know,” he said.

“Take it,” Mid said. “Take the fucking money and leave us alone.”

“
Peter,
” the woman said, one last time. He turned and looked back at her. Then he nodded, put the leg back in the truck, snatched the cash out of Mid's hand, and walked across the yard and up onto his front porch. The woman opened the door for him. They went inside without looking back. I thought I heard a deadbolt. We stood right where we were. Finally, Mid said, “I think we should go.”

We got in the car. I put my seatbelt on. He put his on. He backed us up, got us turned around the right way in the narrow street. He had to lean to see around the broken part of windshield. We found the main road. We stopped at a light. A Ripley's tour trolley crossed through the intersection, people taking pictures out the open sides. They took pictures of us. When the light went green again, Mid drove us a little ways, then pulled into an empty parking lot behind a closed-down chicken place. He parked and put the keys up on the dashboard. There was something new that was blown-through about him. He kept pinching his nose. He said, “What the fuck would we have done?”

“If what?” I'd been keeping it reasonably under control, but now, with the car stopped, I felt sick, almost like I had a fever. “I think what you did was right,” I said. “I think that was the only thing.”

“Are you alright?” he said.

“Are you?”

“No,” he said, and put his head on the steering wheel. “No, I'm not.”

“Did you really recognize him?” I said.

“He's that pirate from the grocery store.”

“Are you sure?”

“I'm pretty sure.”

“How could that be?” I said.

“Same as anything else,” he said. “Things happen. All kinds of things.” His head was still down on the wheel. “I don't want anybody to know about this,” he said.

“Which part?”

“I don't want to tell Carolyn.”

“Except you have to tell her,” I said. “Don't you?”

“You'd tell Alice?” he said.

“I think I would.”

“She'll just say this is one more thing.”

“Mid,” I said. “Isn't it? Isn't that what's up here?”

He said, “Things are starting to go bad on me.” And he began to cry, which was horrible. It made it so I didn't get to wish I could find a leg of my own, bash him over the head once or twice. You destroyed my life, I wanted to say, except it wasn't true. It was only almost true. A tornado skips and jumps and people say God's plan. Nobody ever says luck of the draw. I put my hand on his back. “I'm sorry,” he said, and started saying it over and over, sobbing it, almost. I did not stop him to tell him we were OK, or that we were going to come through it one way or another. I didn't tell him we weren't, either. I left my hand on him. I didn't tell him anything. I did not want to lie.

Setting the dinner table, Delton was telling Alice, in vivid Technicolor, about a TV show she liked to watch, a dance contest show for groups of dancers. Alice was asking questions: There are judges? People call in and vote? This was not a show we watched, but she was trying. Here was the nuclear world: Home from battle, dinner as a family. Alice had placemats out. Candles, even. She'd gotten candles. We looked every bit the part.

“What do these people do when they're not on the show?” Alice said.

Delton said, “What do you mean?”

“Are they professionals? Do they dance for a living?”

“No. They do other things.”

“Like what?”

“This one girl who was on last year was a pharmacist. She just really liked to dance.”

“Did she win?” Alice asked.

“No. Her group was pretty bad. They went out early.”

They had something going, Alice and Delton. They talked to each other easily. Not that Delton was cozied up to either of us and confessing secrets—she had her actual friends for that. But this was working. It was fragile, but working.

Delton went to the sink, filled her glass with water. “So,” she said. “What did you and Dad do today?”

“Me?” I said.

“Yeah. How was your day? What did you do?”

I thought about how to tell them. It was pretty much all I'd thought about. I said, “I'm fairly sure we got mugged.” They both stopped what they were doing. “We went out to see some guy about buying his tow truck,” I said. “He ended up shaking Mid down for a few hundred dollars.”

“What are you talking about?” Alice said. “Are you guys alright?”

I looked at them—my wife and my imaginary daughter. “It's hard to say.”

We'd spent the afternoon ignoring it. He didn't want to talk. He wanted to drive by Me Kayak, drive by the sunglasses hut, make sure everything that was supposed to have four walls and a roof still did. For a little while he worked on a plan to call in a favor from the state agents, get them to go out and rattle Pete Brett an appropriate amount. You could see him trying to hold it together, go through the motions—but he definitely wasn't the same. He dropped me back at the condo, and when I came through the door, Alice and Delton were already making dinner, laughing about something, privately, it seemed like, and so all I'd done was say hello and seek shelter in the back bedroom. Our bedroom. I stood in the window and watched some people out on the water having real trouble making a catamaran go any other direction than the way it wanted to go. Then Alice and Delton called me in to eat, and there we were. “The guy was strung out or something,” I told them. “We were standing in his driveway, talking to him about his truck, and he snapped. He told Mid to give him some money. Mid gave it to him.”

“That doesn't sound like Dad,” Delton said.

I said, “He was threatening us.”

“With what?” Alice said.

“A leg.”

“A what?” they said, almost at the same time.

“He had this thing he wanted to sell, a gearshift made out of a mannequin leg. He smashed the windshield with it.”

Delton said, “Did he hit you guys or anything?”

“Mid got us out of there before things turned too hairy.”

“I don't understand,” said Alice. “He just asked you for money?”

The whole thing was like waking from a dream you were already forgetting. “Pretty much,” I said. “He smashed the windshield, and then he asked for a thousand dollars.”

“You had a thousand dollars?”

“Mid did,” I said. “More than that.” Suddenly I felt like I'd sold him out by telling them that. Surely this was not the kind of information you were supposed to hand over to somebody's daughter.

Alice put both her hands on her placemat, spread her fingers out wide. “Olivia,” she said. “What does your dad really do?”

“Alice,” I said.

Delton said, “Follow me around. Tell me not to get tattoos after I've already got them.” She cracked an ice cube in her teeth. “He's OK?” she asked me. “For real? You're telling the whole thing?”