Whirligig (9 page)

ANNOUNCER
:
So you, for instance, unlike the other kids, would never call Miss Rappalini “Miss Ravioli” behind her back.

ME
:
Exactly, Bob.

ANNOUNCER
:
Then throwing the rock, if I understand you, was breaking every commandment in the pledge.

ME
:
You said it, Bob.

In my journal I write, “We went camping. It was fun.”

After the trip, we had more and more arguments about practicing. My mother said I should play for longer since school was out and I had more time. Naturally, she had one of the whirligig photos blown up and framed. She took down a poster of Ken Griffey, Jr., with a bat on his shoulder to make room on my wall. Every day she'd say, “Remember the harp player, Anthony—always practicing!” It was almost like I was John Henry, in that song with him racing against a machine.

ANNOUNCER
:
There's a trivia question for our audience. Who won the track-laying race between John Henry and the machine?

ME
:
The machine. We sang it last year. John Henry dies.

ANNOUNCER
:
You, Tony, were in his spot. Tell us what happened.

ME
:
I didn't die, or I wouldn't be here, Bob. Instead, I dropped out of the race.

My mother started working part-time. I was supposed to tape my practices when she was gone. She didn't always get around to listening to the tapes right away. Sometimes they'd pile up. I'd tell her I'd practiced, then give her a tape from a few days before. I was supposed to be working on this piece for a big recital in August. I just sort of quit. I tried not to think about it. I told my mother I'd be playing something I already knew at the recital. I'd gotten away with the tapes—so why stop? When I told her I was going to the park down the street, I was really out with Ronnie Sneed, sneaking under the country club fence, looking for golf balls. We'd clean them up and sell them to a junk shop. Then we'd use the money to play video games. Or buy candy. Or go to the movies. He's the one who taught me how to buy one ticket and see all the different movies at the multiplex. Including
Death of a Stripper,
rated R. Which is where one of the theater guys found us. Naturally, he called our parents. This was the day before the recital.

I get up and sharpen my pencil. Then I write, “I played the Bach Gavotte in D Major at a recital last week.” Which is as much of a lie as the rest of the journal. My teacher, Mr. Mintz, was accompanying me on piano. I could tell he knew I wasn't ready by how slowly he started us off. Even so, right away, I forgot the two grace notes. Then I messed up on the trill and the G-sharp. Mr. Mintz started again, but I actually played worse the second time. My hands were sweating and the strings felt slippery. I forgot to play the repeat. Then I forgot the bowing. Then I forgot the notes. It was like a car breaking down. We quit without ever playing the second section. People made themselves clap. My mother just looked down at the floor.

ANNOUNCER
:
Wow. A new American League record for errors committed in a single composition. Must have been tough facing the fans after that.

ME
:
Let's just say we didn't stay for the refreshments.

ANNOUNCER
:
Guess you have to just put it behind you and work twice as hard to get your skills up to major-league standards.

ME
:
Actually, Bob, that's not how it's worked out.

I had a long talk with Mr. Mintz, alone. He's an old man. He didn't seem mad at me. I told him everything, even about the whirligig. Then he called my mother into the room. He told us this Chinese saying, about how rest gives strength to activity. That's why there's night after day. And winter after summer, when the plants stop growing. He said the whirligig worked the same way. If it turned all the time without stopping, it would break.

ANNOUNCER
:
Do you remember Coach Mintz's exact words?

ME
:
You bet, Bob. “The harp player plays her harp. Then she rests. Then she plays again.” He said he thought it was an excellent idea to have a picture of the whirligig on the wall, to remember this. Then he looked at my mother and he said, “After speaking with Tony, I believe that he's ready for a rest.”

I'd broken the pledge. Now my mother broke hers. After Mr. Mintz talked to her alone, she actually let me quit violin. She also promised she wouldn't talk about the sixth-grade Scholarship Award. It was wonderful. Almost too good to be true. But that's the thing about throwing up—it's yucky, but then you feel a lot better.

I stare at my journal. Then I write, “The summer turned out to be pretty good.” I don't have to be the best anymore. I celebrate by erasing the
e
in
pretty
and putting in an
i.
We don't get graded for spelling in our journals. I look at the word and almost crack up.

Then I look at the clock. The pregame show is starting. I pretend to scratch under my shirt and start feeding the cord down my sleeve.

ANNOUNCER
:
That's one heck of a plan, with the earplug and all. I'd say maybe you take after that famous great-grandfather of yours after all.

ME
:
Thanks, Bob. Maybe you're right.

Apprentices

“He yanked her appendix out right quick. He said it was a time bomb, just fixing to explode. Then while he was poking around, he noticed something odd about her liver.…”

Brent was beyond commenting, nodding, or even looking in the woman's direction. She'd boarded in Phoenix. He'd said hello. In reply, she'd unrolled the immense panorama of her medical history, then had moved on to her husband—killed by doctors in 1981—then had switched to their Chihuahua, Pepe, whose string of sufferings exceeded Job's, and now had begun on the first of four daughters. Brent felt as if he'd turned on a TV to the Disease Channel. He aimed his gaze into the night. A full moon stage-lit the desert and revealed a troupe of saguaro cactuses. They were strangely human, their thick arms gesturing, each in the midst of a silent soliloquy. To Brent they looked ancient and wise. He'd have believed it if one had spoken. He studied them, wondering what they would say, and fell asleep with his head against the window.

*   *   *

The bus had a half-hour layover in El Paso. He went into the station to stretch his legs and was stopped by the sight of a missing-child flier. He peered at the picture of the dark-haired girl and thought of Lea, permanently missing. He felt like an escaped criminal who'd come face to face with his own “Wanted” poster. He was a fraud, posing as an innocent traveler, no better than the thieves at the San Diego depot.

He strode out the station door and was nearly turned back by the blinding light and blazing heat. He stopped, squinted, then stepped into a shaded doorway to adjust, like a diver decompressing. A time and temperature sign read 109°. He looked around. He'd never been in Texas. He liked not only being somewhere new, but knowing that no one else he knew had any idea where he was at that moment. He'd disappeared, shaken off all pursuers. A few doors down, a sidewalk preacher was declaiming. He was tall and red-faced, his shirt Arctic white and his forehead raining perspiration. Even his Bible seemed to be sweating. His back was to Brent, who couldn't make out his words. Then he turned.

“‘… A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth,'” he shouted out.

He felt the man's tweezerlike eyes close upon him.

“That's what the Lord God said to Cain!” He wiped his face with a handkerchief and turned. Brent quickly retreated into the station, the man's words burning in his brain. Being a stranger in a strange land had suddenly lost its appeal.

*   *   *

The Corn Belt and Wheat Belt didn't do the country justice. Brent passed through a dozen unmentioned zones marked by various firsts: first business using Geronimo's name, first cowboy boots on a passenger, first appearance of catfish on a menu, first time being called “Sugar” by a waitress …

In East Texas the landscape's green deepened and the air hung heavy with moisture. He changed buses in Houston, opened Emil's cast-off copy of
Two Years Before the Mast,
and read all the way across Louisiana. He might almost have been reading his own life. Though the circumstances were different and the year was 1834, Richard Henry Dana had preceded him, setting out on a second existence of his own, leaving the lecture halls of Harvard for a life of travel as a working sailor. No more, Brent promised, would he complain about the bus after reading of the retching, fatigue, perennially wet clothes, and mortal dangers that the author endured. He forced himself to close the book, vowing to make it last.

The billboards announcing the Key Lime Pie Belt first appeared in Alabama, then proliferated across the Florida line. Brent got off in Tampa to transfer at 2:00
A.M
., stiff-jointed and thirsty. He'd been riding for two days and nights. Though his ticket would take him all the way to Miami, the catalog of killings there recounted by the pair behind him had dimmed his desire for another big city. It was hot and muggy. He longed to go swimming. He consulted his map and decided to jump ship on Florida's Gulf coast. He boarded the next local bus heading south and was the only passenger to get off in the small town of Beale Beach. The sky was still black. He smelled the water. Staggering down the deserted main street, he turned down a side road toward a beachfront motel and was informed by the drawling clerk that check-in began at 3:00
P.M
. Brent sleepwalked out. He trudged up the beach, shucked his pack, and fell asleep on the sand.

A mosquito in his ear was his alarm clock. He jerked awake, glanced around, and was startled to find two people strolling past him and the tide risen just short of his sneakers. It was nearly noon. His face felt sunburned. He roused himself, moved back from the water, then viewed the minuscule waves in dismay. When he'd lived in Atlanta they'd come to Florida, to Palm Beach, on the Atlantic side, where the waves had been monstrous and the water bracing. He waded in now and wondered if the water was actually hotter than 98.6°. He felt slightly foolish standing in it, the waves rubbing against his ankles like a cat. He'd had no idea that Florida's two coasts were so different. He considered catching the next bus out. Then he recalled a French woman in the San Diego hostel saying that the disappointments on her trip sometimes turned into her best experiences. Someone else at the dining room table had agreed. Brent didn't really feel like getting back on the bus. He slapped a mosquito dead on his arm and hoped the woman was right.

He ate a long lunch in the Sand Dollar Cafe, treated himself to both pecan and Key lime pie, and felt better. He explored the town, walked out on the pier, noticed that he was in the Ma'am and Sir Belt, and was surprised to find himself using these when he presented himself at a motel. The woman at the desk eyed his pack with suspicion. He sensed her scanning a list of possibilities and checking off “drug smuggler,” “eco-terrorist,” and “atheist backpacker.” She asked to see his driver's license. He had none, hoped she wouldn't ask why, and produced the identity card he'd gotten in Chicago to take its place. He shamelessly loaded on the
Ma'ams,
then amazed himself by asking if there would be a Bible in his room. This gained him admittance to air-conditioning, a shower, a television, a telephone for ordering pizza, and a sagging bed.

He woke to the sound of his neighbor's TV, which had blared ever since Brent had arrived. He turned on the radio to drown out the noise. The station it was set to was playing Dixieland. Brent had rarely bothered with jazz. It was unintelligible, a foreign language. He lay back and listened, tried to follow the trumpet's line, then the clarinet's, then began flipping through the whirligig book, came to the drawing of the marching band—and knew he'd found his next project.

He reached over to the night table for a bookmark. The piece of paper in his hand turned out to be a note from the maid. It read, “I hope your stay is a pleasant one. Trisha.”

She'd put a circle, not a dot, over the
i
in her name, suggesting someone young. He pondered the message, knew that it was really a disguised request for a tip, but felt like taking it at face value as a welcome from a new acquaintance. His second life was short on friendship. He contemplated possible replies:

“I really like what you've done with the room.”

“What's it like to clean motel rooms all day?”

“I'm a seventeen-year-old SWM, handsome, independent…”

“I accidentally killed a girl. I just had to tell someone.”