Two If by Sea (26 page)

Frank came into the kitchen. “Mom, Glory Bee won the Mistingay. How do you like that?”

Hope's silence was as loud as a diatribe. She sat at the table, which, except for her full pot of coffee and her cup, was immaculate of so much as a pencil, plate, or piece of paper. This was upper-echelon consternation, possibly fury. With the same set of emotions across his gullet, Frank's father would have blown himself out by now, with a staccato of
what-the, in-the-name-of, what-the-hell-were-you
 . . . that always used to remind Frank of the old-time actor Eddie Albert. This was the way Hope had behaved when eighteen-year-old Frank, the son of a widow, bragged with foolish bravado about having achieved the highest possible score on the police academy qualifying test.

Frank finally said, “You seem out of sorts. To say the least.”

Hope finished her cup of coffee and poured another. Frank had no idea how his mother didn't spend her whole night cleaning the house in the dark, her eyes as wide as a lemur. Finally, she said, “Ian could have been killed today.”

“Did he get in another accident, Mom? Was it bad? He looked okay just now . . .”

“The reason he's not in bed is because I just haven't had the strength to put him to bed. I've just been able to sit here. I can't believe that I saw what I saw, and how much it frightened me. So I've just been sitting here.”

Frank sat down, and got up again, filling his glass from the tap, abruptly so thirsty it seemed his body had forgotten to inform him of the half marathon he'd just hobbled. The dream voice whined,
I'm tired of this
.
This is so boring!
Though he'd learned to ignore the voice, which he thought of as Ian's other voice, Frank wondered if Ian was unbeknownst either a medium or a ventriloquist . . . or if Frank was finally and emphatically experiencing aural hallucinations under stress.

“What happened, Mom?”

“He could have been killed, but that's really not factual. He should have been killed and anyone else might have been killed. I know Ian isn't invulnerable, Frank. He gets sore throats. He steps on nails—”

“What happened?”

They had been at a McDonald's.

“Don't tell my dad we ate here,” Ian urged Hope.

“You're not supposed to tell
me
. Your dad eats anything!”

Ian was rapturously consuming two number fours, and Hope a plain cheeseburger with black coffee. She remembered the appetite of a kid whose ankles seemed more substantial than his calves, a pallor that nearly scattered light, the clusters of paprika freckles over the bridge of his nose and cheeks the only evidence that this child, who spent all day outside, ever saw the sun. It was then that Hope became aware of two men hassling each other in the way men will, in a booth at the back of the restaurant. She turned half toward them, not wanting them to notice her staring, but to see if she knew either one of them, since half the young men (and not-so-young men and women) in town had writhed or skated through their term-paper research in Mrs. Mercy's library.

She didn't recognize either of these two at first.

They were farmers or construction workers, with hands rough-dried as stumps, past the point that immersion in a bucket of hand lotion could ever have silkened them. Between them sat a woman who was no more than twenty-five. Hope knew that it was uncharitable and unworthy of her, but she had a certain reaction to the appearance of a woman like this: the girl had dyed her hair to the texture and color of dried grass, presumably to effect an improvement. Unable to stop herself, Hope wondered what they thought when they consulted their mirrors every morning. Were they happy? Did they think, Now, that's the look I was going for? How could any previous hair have been less attractive? Hope colored her own hair expensively, with a few strands of its original brown through the sides and back, and attractive silvering waves around her face, neither denying age nor permitting it liberties. When she saw girls like this girl, she felt the way she had about teachers at school who spent six hundred dollars on leather boots but didn't get their teeth straightened.

Frank had, by this time, consumed four glasses of water, and thought he might go mad if his mother didn't get to the point. It was a trait he could have forgiven had it been a sign of the meandering discursiveness of age; but Hope had been like this all her life. Much as she admired writers of lean prose, she had never been able to tell a story in anything but the most upholstered fashion. She was the Mozart of anecdotes.

The two men seemed at first to be engaging in some kind of rough-cut verbal horseplay, but then, and fast, it turned ugly. Soon one, then the other, was on his feet, and the girl with ruined hair eventually began to remonstrate with both of them to cut it out, get over it, that it was ancient history, just finish eating.

The first clear sentence Hope heard was, “I will if that rancid sonofabitch admits he did it. But he ain't never admitted he did it. He keeps saying it happened, like it was some kind of goddamn lunar eclipse or something . . .”

“Which is why if I'd done it, I'd have said I did it. Why wouldn't I? What am I scared of, you?”

“You fucking ought to be scared of me, you done it.”

“Listen, Larry, if I did do it, I'm so absolutely not at all scared of you that I'd do it again right now. But I didn't do it.”

And then the guy Hope later called the Astronomer got up and threw a cup of ice in the face of the man who hadn't done whatever it was, and that guy leaped to his feet and shoved the Astronomer, the girl now actively with her hands on both of them, pushing them apart as they slapped her hands away.

“Look,” Ian said. “I have this whole fries. No ketchup.”

“There's kids in here!” called a fat young man with the crisp white shirt that identified him as some sort of management. He put both hands on the counter and hoisted himself halfway over. “You either sit down or get out of my store!”

For a moment, it looked as though both the Astronomer and Larry would forgive their mutual grievance and whale on the graduate of McDonald's University, but the chubby young man said, “You take one step at me, and I'm calling the cops. A.J., I don't care if you got a hundred brothers and all of them are seven feet tall. I will do it.”

While the Astronomer was eyeballing the manager, Larry threw a punch. It wasn't a hard blow, but it connected with the Astronomer's substantial gut and he whirled and backhanded Larry across the jaw.

“You asshole coward, can't get a woman on your own.”

“You couldn't do nothing with her if you had her, your pecker ain't long enough to poke past that belly. Lot of Bud in there, ain't no running back no more, are you?”

“Why don't you say that again while I'm looking right at you instead of behind my back?” The Astronomer grabbed a fistful of Larry's shirt and pushed him hard against a stack of trays, which flew out over the floor like a stack of cards, and the manager yelled, “Okay, I'm doing it now! I'm calling the cops.”

Half dragged, half pushed by the girl, the two battlers went outside to the parking lot, and, as Hope finally got up to get a little paper cup filled with ketchup for Ian, she noticed that the thirty or forty patrons were beginning to gather at the windows to see what they could see.

“A. J. McCarron never had any sense, and what he had, the war beat it out of him. I don't care if they're separated and she's doing a lap dance, she's still another man's wife, and if that's not how they do it in Madison, that's how they do it here.”

A woman murmured, “She doesn't exactly look like she's worth going to jail for.”

“She did once. She had some drugs back a while ago, but that girl was a cheerleader for the Badgers. College girl. The whole thing.”

“You think they'll cool off now,” the woman said. It wasn't a question.

“Look! Hell no!” the man shouted, and Hope peered out the floor-to-ceiling windows. Unbelievably, the two men were about to kill each other in the parking lot, in front of the restaurant patrons and ten ladies in pedicure flip-flops who'd come out of the nail salon next door. From each of their company trucks, each guy grabbed a weapon. Larry took the first swipe, with an eighteen-pound hammer, aiming straight for the Astronomer's head. He may not have been a running back anymore, but his reflexes were intact; he hopped up on the running board of his truck and came at Larry with something that looked to Hope like an ice ax. He threw that, then he grabbed up a huge scythe that glimmered evilly in the sun.

He swung, and got Larry in the elbow with the flat of the scythe. Two of the pedi-women opened the door. “Call the cops!” one of them shrieked.

Larry struck back, landing a hard blow on the other man's shoulder with the hammer. Hope heard the injured man shriek. The girl who had been with them leaped around them like a terrier.

“That's enough!” the girl screamed. “That's enough!”

But the Astronomer kept coming, slashing at Larry, who jumped back a few inches every time the blade flickered closer. “You messed with the wrong man this time, you lowlife piece of shit. Next time she comes to see you, it'll be in the ICU!” He took the hammer in two hands and raised it over his head.

One of the older women at the windows shouted, “Where are the police? The police station is two blocks from here! And oh my God, one of them has a little kid with him.”

Hope carried the ketchup back to the table, hoping Ian's own curiosity wouldn't get the best of him. Other kids were standing on the molded plastic seats along the widows, and a couple, to her horror, were yelling, “Cut him! Cut him!” She was counting on Ian's love for forbidden fries to keep him cemented to his seat.

He wasn't in his seat.

Hope glanced at the crowd around the windows. Ian wasn't with them.

She cried out, “Ian!” No one even glanced her way. She screamed, “Ian!
Ian!
”

She did not put two and two together, she told Frank.

She ran toward the bathroom, where Ian loved to go, in any public place, to soak paper towels, make them into balls, and try to stick them on the ceiling. Then the same woman who'd asked at large for the police said, “The guy with the hammer just almost hit that little kid!”

“Dear God! That little kid is trying to grab that sword!”

And there was Ian.

He was almost to the space between the two men, who were thrashing furiously, with fists and tools, their faces empurpled with rage and new bruises, blood coursing freely from a wound on the forehead of the man who was not Larry. One good blow and one of those guys would be dead. Hope's skin tightened and she opened her mouth to stop this, to shout, to shout and make this stop, but she couldn't speak and she couldn't move. She watched her dream self burst through the doors, throwing her own body between the combatants, but all she did in reality was drop the ketchup and take a single, unsteady step.

Ian's back was to her.

She could not see Ian's mouth moving, or his hands moving.

She could see only those big war weapons splitting the air.

Ian reached up and touched Larry. Larry swung—and then, needing all his body weight to interrupt the descent of the big hammer—stopped it two inches from Ian's head.

“I'm going to faint,” the manager said. “I have to sit down.”

Ian swung his hands, rocking them, back and forth.

“What's he doing?” one of the pedi-women asked.

“It's some kind of talking. He's deaf and he's talking to them. My daughter-in-law can do that talk.”

“He stopped them. That child . . .”

“No, it's one of their own kids, is all,” a male spectator said firmly.

Larry burst into tears and dropped to his knees on the pavement next to Ian, clutching Ian in his arms. “I'm so sorry!” he called out.

The other man bent down, too, heaving for breath, his hands on his thighs. When he got his breath, the Astronomer tossed his ax and scythe into the back of his truck and smiled at Ian, reaching past him to give Larry the Hammer sort of a good-natured clap on the shoulder. The lethal boil went flat, stopped as if the stop button on a projector was pressed.

“Whose kid is this?” Larry yelled.

“It's not their kid!” the manager said. “Is he from TV or something?”

Hope had finally forced her feet to move.

“That's my grandson!” she called, her voice a cackle of breath. “Leave him alone.”

“He's fine, ma'am,” the Astronomer said. “There, kiddo. Go on by your granny. You probably scared her coming out here. My buddy and me, we were just being pigheaded. Didn't come to nothing. I better get back to work. Now Dudley Do-Right in there is calling the police?”

“He fainted! But I'll call the police myself! You could have killed my grandson. You both deserve to be arrested.” Hope, Frank knew, rarely lost her composure; it was her secret weapon, and the gale force of her agitation had shocked even her. Closer now, she studied the man they'd called Larry, who'd gotten to his feet. “You're Luke Cerniak. You're Emily's son.”

“Yes, Mrs. Mercy.” For some reason, the young man removed his cap and held it in his two hands. “I'm sorry.”

“You were in honors classes! You went to college!”

“It's my company,” the man said, pointing to the name Cerniak & Sons Custom Cement on the truck. “I do well.”

“Then what's the meaning of this? And why were they calling you Larry?”

“I changed my name. ‘Luke' sounded too much like an old man.”

Hope said, “You fool.” Larry wiped his eyes.

Hope said to Frank, “I felt like Alice in Wonderland. I had no idea what was going on. I just grabbed Ian's hand and got in the car and I passed the police car coming the other way, and I'm sure fifty people recognized me and saw what happened.”