Dance Real Slow (7 page)

“You like her?” I ask Calvin. He does not answer; he does not know what I am talking about. Climbing back toward me, he leans down and places both hands
around the mouth of the flimsy Pepsi cup. I hold the bottom, helping him lift it to his face. Flecks of wax float on the liquid's dark, oily surface. Calvin takes large, open swallows that cause his Adam's apple to throb, pushing against the soft, taut skin of his throat. When finished, he pants, lips parted so he can catch his breath.

At halftime, Tarent is behind, 24-6. Richard Blyth comes over and stands a few rows below us, his right leg propped the next level up, his forearms crossed against his knee. Richard's oldest son, Sam, is a third-string wide receiver for Tarent. He is only a sophomore and still quite skinny and gawky. Richard asks Calvin if he is enjoying the game, if someday maybe he wants to play football. But Calvin is quiet, scribbling on a game program with my felt-tip pen.

“I think I may have rented the floor above us,” says Richard.

“That's great.” I'm watching a group of teenagers gathered at the bottom of the grandstand, in front of the black cinder track that encircles the field. “To whom?”

“A couple of accountants. They're kids—just outta college. Kansas State. One of them grew up around here. He says the other fella is from Tulsa. They're going to talk it over, but I've got a good feeling.”

The teenagers' voices carry and I can hear them talking about a party later this evening at a Jake somebody's house. His parents have gone to visit relatives in Missouri and won't be back until late Sunday. One girl, dressed in a faded, oversized jean jacket, khaki trousers rolled up to midcalf, and high-top sneakers with red-and-gray laces, lets out a loud scream. Shaking her head, she
grabs the arm of the girl next to her and shouts “No way” three or four times.

“Young business types are just the kind of people we want in there,” says Richard. “Quiet. Responsible. Courteous.”

A tall, blond-haired boy in a Tarent letter jacket walks up to the group. He is greeted by a girl in a blousy white turtleneck, speaking in rapid sentences that I cannot understand. She is using her hands, pointing beyond the craggly line of treetops, to her right. She brings her hands together, forming a T, and the blond boy nods, saying, “Second house.”

“Are you going to get the price you wanted?” I ask Richard.

“I lowered it a little. They're just starting out and all and I figured I'd give them a break. But only until they get settled—six months or so. Then the lease goes back up to my asking price.”

It has become breezy and I slip a sweatshirt on Calvin. He fights it at first, hooking his arms against his chest, folding forward, level to his legs. I rub my knuckles down the side of his rib cage, gaunt and exposed, causing him to giggle and squirm. He relaxes and I tug the shirt down over his head, pulling his arms out and rolling the sleeves back above his wrists.

The two teams return to the field in a trot—Tarent's limp and measured. Calvin stands high on the seat, stretching his neck as if looking for somebody. But he knows no one, at least not well enough to recognize unless you were to point them out and say their name. I grab hold of Calvin's jeans, my fingers buried inside
the waistband near the small of his back. He slaps at my hand, moaning, while he tries to shove me away.

“You wanna fall?” I ask, jerking him from side to side.

He nods.

“Oh yeah?” I push him forward, dangling him horizontally over the seats in front of us. He laughs, waving his arms in a crawl stroke toward escape. Swimming to freedom. “You are a very peculiar boy,” I say. Richard smiles slow and then turns, in time to see Sam glancing up in his bright, unsoiled uniform, the number 88 wrapped to his sides, the front and back ends tucked below his arms. Richard waves and Sam starts to wave back, but stops, looking around before lifting his hand quickly, lamely, wiggling his fingers and then reaching to snap his chin strap in the same motion. His helmet is too large and as he pushes the buckle into the right side, the helmet shifts against his head, lurching leftward.

“Well, I'd better be getting back,” says Richard, pointing across the grandstand to where his wife and some friends are sitting.

“If it stays like this, maybe the coach will put Sam in.”

Richard raises his eyebrows and shrugs. He says “Maybe” and then descends to the walkway at the grandstand's base, passing the group of teenagers as he returns to his seat.

My memories of football games with my own father are surprisingly pleasant. Sunday mornings I would
awaken in time to read through the sports page while my mother prepared our lunches: three sandwiches apiece, usually kosher salami and Swiss cheese on Italian bread, an apple or pear or banana, cookies stored in plastic sandwich bags, pretzels—which my father preferred infinitely to potato chips—several cans of ginger ale, and a thermos of coffee. Game time was one, but we always left the house by eleven. With traffic, it took about forty minutes to get to the stadium and another fifteen minutes to park. We always took the same route: down Chester, right on East 9th, and then left to St. Clair, to the second of two underground parking garages.

We did not speak much, my father and I, and when we did, it was invariably about something trivial, like how I was doing in school or a recent movie we both saw or why the Cleveland Browns should or should not trade a particular running back or linebacker. It always seemed odd to me that my father, who made his living teaching, communicating, was unable to do so away from the game of basketball, with his own family. Later in life, after I had married, my mother told me that when she started dating my father, while they were both still in college, they would often stay up talking until five in the morning at a local doughnut shop. She would always be the one to break off conversation, say it is time to go, she needed sleep. When I asked her what they talked about, she took a breath, low and swift, and then said, everything. They talked about everything. I told her I found it hard to believe, and she agreed. It seemed like
another lifetime, she said, or maybe one that belonged to somebody else.

Tarent has lost by 32 points. Sam Blyth played the last offensive series of the game, but the ball was never thrown in his direction. Calvin is tired and I carry him over my right shoulder, like a sack of grain. At our car, I watch the tall blond boy in the letter jacket talking with another girl, helping her into his pickup truck. A pair of miniature basketball sneakers hang from his rearview mirror, red and black and white, swinging in quick ovals that change motion with the truck's movements. He rolls down his window and stops, exchanging words with another letter-jacket-clad boy before pulling out of the parking lot and onto Montgomery Street. As I lower Calvin to the seat, a woman's hand reaches in and brushes a gentle tongue of hair from his forehead. It is Joyce Ives.

“Hello, sweetie,” she says to Calvin. Dressed in a tan hunting jacket and jeans, Joyce turns away, taking a cigarette from her purse. She touches its end with a silver Zippo and returns the lighter to one of the baggy pockets on her jacket.

“You caught us leaving. He's tired.” I close Calvin inside the car, his head droopy as a daffodil.

“You're a hard man to get ahold of.”

“I'm sorry. I've been kinda busy lately. How're you feeling?”

“I'm fine. Took the neck brace off two days ago.”

“Really, I've been meaning to call you.”

She nods, blowing cigarette smoke quick, like steam, from the corner of her mouth. “I heard you met with Rob.”

“Yeah, but just to look at the car. To see how bad the damage was.” I kick at some gravel, forming a small pile with the instep of my foot. “Rob says it's running pretty well.”

“That's because I took my foot off the gas.”

“Excuse me?”

“I took my foot off the gas—after I hit. That's why I didn't do more damage to the car or the inside of Gooland's. Shit, I could have driven right into the kitchen—with Rob as a goddam hood ornament.”

I am not sure what to say, how to respond to Joyce. Staring down, I bury my toe in the center of the gravel pile and dig out a hole in its center.

“You wouldn't have really wanted to hurt him?”

“Maybe.”

She tilts her head back, smoke clinging to her face as it lifts upward. Someone is playing country-and-western music on a radio and it gets softer as his car becomes more distant.

“Oh, heck. No. No, I didn't want to hurt Rob bad. Just scare him a little. Scare him a lot. And knock him on his ass.”

We both smile. I walk around to the driver's side of the car, picking at a crusted stamp of bird dropping on the door handle with my key.

“Joyce, we're going to have to settle this whole thing away from court. Sit down, first with Rob and then with
Frankie Larch. You're not exactly in a position of power.”

“Correct me if I'm wrong here, Gordo. But you're
my
lawyer. You're supposed to please
me.”

I don't like people calling me Gordo. Some of my father's friends used to call me Gordo, usually followed by a flat slap delivered between my shoulder blades. “Howya doin', Gordo?” But it sounds severe, more condescending, in the high, clean tone of Joyce's voice.

“Listen, I'm tired. Calvin is tired. He's not used to being up this late. Yes, you are correct, I am your lawyer. I didn't choose to be, but Harper asked me to take this … this … this case—for lack of a better word. If you want, we can plead temporary insanity or something. But nohow, in no universe, are you going to see one penny from anyone other than Rob.”

Joyce rests her chin on the roof of the car, and when she starts to talk, she looks like a puppet. “We can sue him.”

“For what?”

“For fucking around on me. For screwing some waitress behind my back.”

“Jesus, Joyce.” I open the door, grabbing at the top of the steering wheel, preparing to pull myself in. “You're married to the man. You know what he makes, what he has. You want his Camaro? You've already got it. What else, huh? What else is there?”

There is nothing else, really. The mortgage on their house cannot be worth much. Neither can his savings account.

“We can talk more about this next week,” I say. “I
don't know what Harper has said to you, but your expectations are unrealistic. The best thing for everybody is to just sit down and talk this out.”

She does not say anything for several minutes and I settle into the seat, sliding the key carefully into the ignition. Finally, she moves to the front of the car, dragging her finger along its dusty surface as she goes.

“He's living with her now,” she says, loud, making sure I can hear her from where I'm sitting. “He's my husband and he's living with another woman.”

I nod, as if I know how she feels.

She walks across the now empty parking lot into blackness and I watch her for a few steps and then start the car. When I look up, she is gone and it's too dark to find her again. A moment later, two car lights switch on and Rob's Camaro moves slowly toward the exit, gravel crunching beneath its tires. Squinting, I can barely make out the orange blush of a cigarette bobbing between Joyce's lips, as if she is talking to someone, but of course she is not. There is nobody with her, nobody at all.

Loy McLure is standing in a long white lab coat, arms crossed high against his chest, a stethoscope wrapped around his neck, its round, silver end tucked neatly into a breast pocket. His eyes are worried slits, dark pupils ticking back and forth, showing narrow milky petals on either side. He looks at me and then over to Calvin, who is perched on a light blue examination table, paper crinkling underneath his bottom. Loy walks to the sink and his shoes squeak as they lift from the tile floor.

“I'm not sure if this is going to work,” he says, taking
out a gray plastic bottle. “The rot has already set in.”

He leans over the brushed-steel counter, tapping at a strainer that holds Calvin's man-o-war. The man-o-war is the size of a fist, marbled, smooth, a translucent green speckling its underside. Mold, as on bread, grows randomly in several coin-sized blotches over its gummy skin. Loy spills alcohol on it and then half fills the mason jar with formaldehyde. When he sets the man-o-war into the jar, using rubber gloves, the formaldehyde erupts into small fizzing bubbles, hissing at the surface and then vanishing, sinking with its cargo.

“You'll have to wait and see,” Loy says, pouring more formaldehyde into the jar, stopping a few inches before its top. “I don't know anything about these. This might make it worse.”

He closes the jar and blots it dry with paper towels, handing it to Calvin, who grabs by the coat hanger. I tell him to hold tight while I lift them both to the ground.

“Where'd he get something like that?” Loy asks, peeling the gloves from his hands and dropping them into the trash.

“My mother sent it. From Florida.”

“Sort of a peculiar gift, don't you think?”

“Yes. I do.”

Loy nods, knowingly, as he takes out a box of DumDum lollipops. Although Loy is only in his early forties, his hair, cropped short, is completely white. He is tall, healthy, with pink triangle-shaped patches following the bold angles of his cheekbones. Shaking the box, he tells Calvin to ask me if he can have one.

“Can I have a pop?”

I tell him he can, so he takes brown.

“That's root beer, Cal. I think you'd rather have cherry or grape,” I say, reaching into the box and removing one of each. But he clings to the root beer, guarding it close to his breast.

Loy follows us out, through his empty waiting room and into the hallway, which is dark, drab, papered in green-and-black paisley. He asks me how Calvin and I are getting along, other than the man-o-war. We are fine, I say, bopping Calvin on the head with the pudgy heel of my fist. I thank Loy again, profusely, and apologize for taking up so much of his time, a statement he shrugs off.