Picturing Will (24 page)

Everyone was pretending there was no foregone conclusion.

Will rolled the little red ball back and forth across the floor as though he were rolling dough. The whole reason he had come to Florida was to see Wag. Why didn’t she know that?

He didn’t know his father.

Corky tried too hard to please.

He would tell his mother—and only his mother—about Spencer and Haveabud in the motel room.

Although he would not tell his mother unless she asked. Sitting at the side of his bed, when he returned, she might ask.

Will looked past his father, out the window. The darkness was a huge mole on a giant’s back. The giant had backed up against the window. Inside was what was happening in houses, and outside sat the giant. What the giant looked at, Will couldn’t be sure. It was possible that the giant could see all of history. That he sat just the way Will sat in a school chair, studying all of history, which moved in front of him like an endless movie. Maybe all the world was a movie, and the giant was looking at dinosaurs snapping up lizards, wading into ponds, pulling up bushes to eat.

TWENTY

I
nto Will’s suitcase went the ball and jacks, which Corky had put in a Baggie and tied with a yellow twist tie. Also the T-shirt whose front depicted a sandy beach with people stretched out on striped towels, water lapping the shore, seagulls swooping. On the back of the shirt were three more seagulls, but this time, instead of rising up against a blue sky, they hovered on white cotton. Corky had let Will pick out any shirt he wanted, and he had picked the shirt with the seagulls.

Corky bought Will flip-flops to wear to the beach. His mother had not even packed beach shoes. Corky thought she might ask Will whether he would like to keep the flip-flops in the hall closet, along with hers and Wayne’s, but then she thought no: What was his was his. If he wanted to feel that there were things left behind in the house that were his, he would have said so.

Corky put Coets on either side of the pyrite and agate she had bought Will at the gem shop: little white cotton pads, like sandwich bread, to protect the slices and discs.

She was sorry for him. She would have driven him to see Wag—gone back and forth in one day—except that both the other salesgirls were out sick, and she was the only one who could help Marian. She was glad she had not raised the possibility of the trip with Will, because he would have been further disappointed.

Corky and Wayne and Will had watched the fishermen, and seen the sunset, and eaten fried shrimp at the seafood restaurant. Will’s dinner, ordered from the children’s menu, had been called The Captain Nemo. He had been allowed to go to the treasure chest and select a toy. He brought back a plastic camera. Looking into it and pushing the button, you saw first a starfish, then a whale, then a school of silvery fish.

“How do shrimp see?” Will asked.

“They have heads. When they clean them, they take off the heads,” Wayne said.

“When they clean lobsters they don’t take off the heads,” Will said.

“They don’t clean lobsters,” Wayne said.

Now Corky looked at Will, who was sitting on the bed, watching her put things in his suitcase. New York had pigeons and Florida had seagulls and pelicans. Nobody had dinosaurs. What Haveabud and Spencer had been doing might have had something to do with dinosaurs. There were no more dinosaurs, but maybe Haveabud and Spencer were involved in a ritual to bring them back. That was why the ritual had to be private. Secrets had to be whispered. It went without saying that he should have sealed lips. But if his mother asked. Was Haveabud’s ritual similar to what went on between his mother and Mel? Some night ceremony, to bring back the dinosaurs? If he could see what they did. If his mother asked. On television, Perry Mason asked people questions in court. When Perry Mason heard an answer he didn’t like, he looked to the side, with his bird-bright eye. Another, more difficult question followed.

“I’m putting in your flip-flops,” Corky said, a slight question in her voice. Will knocked his toes together in his stocking feet. He was not supposed to wear shoes when his legs were stretched out on the bed. It was really not a bed but a sofa that turned into a bed. At first, he had been afraid of the dressmaker’s dummy in the corner because it looked like a warrior, waiting for the signal to do battle.

G.I. Joe was back in the zippered bag he had been in when he arrived. Like a body bag, Corky thought. She asked Will if she should leave the bag out, so that he could have it on the plane. He nodded that she should. Wayne was trying to help Eddie start his lawnmower.

Lobsters probably got to keep their heads because they were bigger. Lobsters would fight, because they were big, but shrimp wouldn’t fight, because they were small. In a fight between a lobster and a shrimp, the lobster would win. Beady black eyes would win. Haveabud and Spencer had dark eyes. Brown eyes with black pupils. Haveabud was a lobster and Spencer was a shrimp. Spencer would be afraid to fight with Haveabud.

Why couldn’t his mother give the magazine one of the pictures she already had of him?

Corky put Will’s shorts and underwear in the suitcase. She had laundered them. His mother had folded his socks. Corky put them together in a different way, pulling the cuff of one over the ball made by the two rolled socks. That was the way his socks would go home, to show Jody that this was her way.

His mother had packed a white shirt and a bow tie. Corky thought Will would look like a midget businessman if he wore those things. The only pants Jody packed were jeans.

Seersucker pajamas. Little boys would still allow you to put pajamas on them. When they got older, they would sleep in their underwear. When they left their parents’ house, they would sleep naked.

Will watched Corky fold the seersucker pajamas. Running your hand over seersucker was like moving your hands up and down your body when you had insect bites.

Into the suitcase went the plastic camera from the seafood restaurant, which was now stuck on the picture of the whale, and the book about gems that Corky had bought him. A place mat imprinted with a map of the area. A penny that had been pressed into an oval souvenir of Florida. Maybe Mel could think of a way to attach the flattened copper penny to a chain so his mother could wear it as a necklace. Before they left New York, Mel had shown him an ad in a magazine for diamond rings and asked him to guess which one his mother would like best. Mel pointed to the small type at the bottom of the page: All the rings were enlarged to show detail. Mel could buy his mother a diamond ring, and he could give her a bright, thin penny on a chain.

Purple was amethyst. Green was jade. Though pink also could be jade. The man in the crystal store had given him a piece of smooth pink stone. While Corky worked, Will walked through the mall to the crystal store and crayoned a picture for the man on a legal pad. In exchange, the man gave him the smooth stone, which he proudly gave to Corky. In the crystal store, you could buy chains with little discs on top and tubes of glue so that you could make anything they sold into a keyring. Will suggested to Corky that she do that, and she had said that it was an excellent idea.

The dressmaker’s dummy was more like a skeleton than a warrior, as she had shown him, turning the light on and turning the headless body. What harm could it do without a head?

Dinosaurs in the museums were skeletons.

The dummy had no head, like a shrimp whose head had been removed.

It was harmless: a shape, a shadow. Nothing at all.

In the tent in Virginia, he and Wag had made Martian dolls: Kleenex boxes standing upright, with upside-down saucers on the end to look like heads, and strings from an old mop held on to the saucers with masking tape. The boxes did a dance, illuminated by flashlights placed behind them that pointed up, backlighting the forms, which danced on a field of white Kleenex. The flashlights were the sun rising, while the box-Martians had a secret ceremony.

If all the dinosaurs had gone into caves. If they came out again someday, the way bats flew at dusk.

His mother had told him that the man who would be king of England did not come right out and ask the woman he wanted to marry to marry him. The king said “If I asked …” so he could find out in advance what she would say.

If his mother asked.

Corky reached under his pillow and took out the Bugs Bunny with a flexible orange body. Bugs held an orange carrot with a spray of green plastic at the top. His big front teeth were white. Bugs probably cleaned according to the advice of the Tooth Lady, flossing every night.

Corky asked if she could pack Bugs. If she left Bugs under the pillow, she would forget to pack him, she was sure. He nodded yes. But no: He did not want Bugs dropped in the zippered case with G.I. Joe. G.I. Joe would be insulted, the way any soldier would be insulted if asked to share quarters with a rabbit. If the rabbit was a pet, that was one thing—but Bugs was the same size as G.I. Joe, only skinnier. He would have to go in the suitcase. Tucked in the pocket of the white shirt he had worn on this trip was fine.

Corky held the bow tie over her top lip, and Will laughed. A lawnmower started outside. That meant that his father and Eddie had triumphed. The people next door always played the same record. If he played a record more than once, his mother objected. When you grew up, you could play any record you wanted, any time you wanted. The lawnmower drowned it out, though. Grass had to be cut. This was a fact. A Virginia and a Florida fact. In New York, there was just the snapping sound of the hedge clippers, when the sister of the man who lived downstairs came to cut branches. You also heard firecrackers and gunshots in New York. In the video arcade, at the mall where Corky worked, he had heard New York sounds. He had led her inside to investigate. Sounds of exploding asteroids and speeding cars that collided. Helicopters that failed to clear the tops of buildings and exploded. Bells and sirens. A spray of dots fired into descending targets that fell in no predictable pattern.

Wayne sat on Corinne and Eddie’s front step, sipping a Schlitz. He raised the can as if toasting Eddie, who shook his head from side to side, pushing the mower. If Wayne hadn’t been able to get the mower going, Eddie’s ass would have been in the doghouse; Corinne had begged him to charge a new mower. She had just
known
that when people were invited over the mower would quit on them again, and the shop wouldn’t get to it for a week.

Corinne was in a good mood now, standing in the doorway, looking at Eddie as admiringly as if he were driving the Indianapolis 500, the baby resting against her chest. Wayne turned and said something to her, and she smiled. Wayne was probably
not
giving her the word that Eddie was going back on the softball team.

That was how they all were: Eddie, confident that the mower would keep going just by the sound of it, began to mow the grass in earnest; Corinne stood outside the screen door; Patsy Cline sang; Wayne tilted the can of Schlitz higher, hurrying to finish, because he never found it easy to make conversation with Corinne.

Corinne was the first to notice the police car. The car was moving slowly, with the windows down, and you could hear the two-way radio: fuzzy words and crackling. It passed by and stopped at the curb in front of Wayne’s house. She patted the baby’s back, as if to soothe it, and watched as both cops got out of the car. One carried something thin and rectangular. Both looked at her, standing in the doorway. Their faces were expressionless. She did not think that they were collecting for the Fireman’s Ball. But
of course
policemen would not be collecting for the Fireman’s Ball. Firemen did that. Police collected for …

Fear gathered in the back of Wayne’s throat. It was there like food that had gone down the wrong way.

Eddie looked at Wayne, and at the policemen walking up Wayne’s walkway. He had helped Wayne put the flagstone down the summer before. Wayne had wanted to leave too much room between stones. Weeds would have grown. Eddie was glad that he had taken his advice about placing them closer together. He stopped mowing the lawn.

Corky opened the door. Wayne could have headed them off, but it was all so sudden. And you couldn’t head off cops. The closest thing Wayne knew to that was a guy he used to work with, years ago, who kept a Masonic ring in his glove compartment and fished it out whenever a cop stopped him for a traffic violation.

Corky pushed the door open and turned and looked at Wayne, sitting on the step, holding a Schlitz. It was the last drink he would have before his life changed. She was looking at him across the distance between houses and he looked back as if she were a lighthouse and he were a boat, receding. She suddenly seemed that tall, as he looked up at her. There were fewer and fewer lighthouses. Things were done electronically. He had thought about getting a boat. Just a small boat, to keep at the dock. Even a rowboat would have been fine. Tie it with a chain. Down at the dock, where the fishermen fished.

He nodded that he was Wayne, when the cop asked.

The other cop looked like somebody who’d steal your girlfriend. Handsome, and with no compunctions. It was hard to imagine which role he’d have if the two of them played Good Cop/Bad Cop, because if he played the Good Cop, men would still resent him because of his good looks and his fuck-you expression; if he played the Bad Cop, he’d be poorly suited to the role. Bad people didn’t look like that. They didn’t look like they should be in the movies. If this was a movie, suspense would be mounting. Everyone would have his fingers in the popcorn bag. Wayne put down the can of beer.

There was a photograph. A small photograph on a clipboard, of Kate.

He nodded when asked if he knew her. He was holding the clipboard like somebody giving a speech, looking down to refresh his memory. Now Corky was standing in front of him. What would this speech be about? There was not one thing on the clipboard but a picture of Kate, smiling.

The other cop took a pill bottle from his pocket. Wayne frowned. He was standing now. When he stood, both cops stepped back. Eddie had come up alongside one of the cops. The lawnmower was in the middle of the yard. The grass behind it was mowed, and the grass in front of it was tall. This was a bad situation. What was the cop showing him?