Rules for Becoming a Legend (10 page)

A kid from across the loading dock joined in, “Yeah, hey Todd—” but he stopped because he could almost see the anger dance off Todd's ox shoulders, heat on cement.

Somehow Ronnie didn't get it. Took the kid's half-said sentence as backup. “Let's hope we don't get another Kirkus letdown!
Columbia City couldn't handle that, although I bet old Diane'd get wet for the headline potential.” He bent his fingers in the air in front of him like he was bracketing a newspaper headline. “Kirkus Curse Strikes Columbia City Again.”

That was how they kidded at Van Eyck Pepsi Plant. Mocked one another about the old days. The time you tried to get the girl, drink the booze, win the fight, land the job, and you failed. It was their catharsis. Their therapy. A manly portal into talking about their feelings. The guys kid you, so you kid 'em back, and at the end of the day, everything is out on the table. No couch. No bill.

It wasn't that way with Todd, though. Ronnie remembered too late. It was never that way with Todd.

“Hey, Todd.” Ronnie looked around the loading dock but got nothing. The rest of the workers avoided his eyes.

Todd slowed in his actions. Carefully he placed the last crate of Pepsi liter bottles into the back of the truck. He breathed out. Then in again. His shoulders flexed. He wasn't the lithe basketball player he used to be. Years of loading heavy crates into the back of trucks had stacked him up comically top-heavy. Arms so big they didn't lie flat if he put them to his sides but angled out instead, like he was about to curtsy. Chest a barrel, neck a series of thick cables. And angry, Todd seemed even bigger. The other men on the loading dock hurried to busy themselves. An alarm had been tripped in Todd's mind and they were picking up on it.
They're gonna use him
, it screamed. Todd started shivering.
They're gonna use my boy!

Todd slammed the back door of the truck shut, kicked a crate of Pepsi cans off the edge of the loading dock. They dropped the three feet to the ground and skittered about the tires like fizzy demons. He leapt down after them, breathing hard, climbed into the cab. Engine took on the first turn and he was off.

Ronnie was yelling, stomping, spitting mad. “Get back here goddamn it, that's company property!”

And Todd floored the truck, middle finger out the window, whole rig tipping on his first turn, his daughter's old cow skull, his accomplice, grinning from the dash. He was gone, renegade.

•   •   •

Jimmy came home but his pops wasn't there. Instead his mother, who should have been at work by then, was pacing in front of the bed, phone at her ear. She wrapped and unwrapped the cord around her arm. It made little white lines in her skin. She wore her nursing uniform. It looked impossibly crisp and clean. Her hair in clips and makeup perfect. Amazing. Dex was on the carpeted floor, watching her.

“I realize that, Mr. O'Rourke,” his mother was saying. “But I don't think calling the police is necessary.”

Jimmy crept up and kneeled in front of his brother. “Dexy?”

“Pops didn't come home,” Dex said.

Something very bad happened
, Jimmy thought.
Maybe he died
. In this moment his mouth went dry and he felt very small. Jimmy had a sister who died—he knew that—and it meant you never got to know them or see them.

There was a picture on his mother's bedside table of his sister, thumbs up and grinning, standing in a rain puddle, wearing a blue jacket with the hood up. It was behind the cradle for the phone, so when his mom hung up she blocked it out for a moment with her hand and sleeve. “Come on, boys, we better get your father.”

“You know where he is?” Dex asked, face slack with relief.

Genny Mori ignored Dex's question and snapped to look at Jimmy. He was pulling threads from the carpet. “Stop that, Jimmy-boy. You know how carpet is?”

Jimmy didn't know and he didn't care.

•   •   •

Freight Train drove across the bridge from Columbia City into Warrington. Past Fred Myers and over the next bridge into Hammond.
He looked out and noticed how sparkly the mud was at low tide. He remembered a story about a man who got sunk waist-deep into that mud when he was out clamming and the tide started coming back in. They couldn't pull him out without ripping him in two, but if they waited, he'd drown.

Past the Shipyard Bar and Grill, the green soccer fields and the turnoff for Camp Kiwanilong, he arrived in Fort Stevens State Park, skidded past the winter-deserted campsites and burst into the Area C parking lot.

His truck was the only vehicle in the lot. He listened to the crates of soda shift and fall in the back of the truck. Ronnie would dock his pay for each broken bottle on top of firing him. Todd didn't care. He was thinking of other things. It was strange to him how the swaying of the trees and bushes growing before the dunes echoed the sounds the crates had made sliding just before they crashed.

He sat in the cab and stared at the trees. Coming back to this place, this place where he had conceived and lost Suzie Q., this was his punishment. He had let her down, and now his boy too. He reached out for the keys to turn off the truck. Hands shook so bad, it took him three tries.
Just a beer
, he thought to himself.
Cool the nerves and then home.

While Van Eyck Beverages exclusively bottled PepsiCo products, they also distributed a wide variety of beers and wines. Todd Kirkus opened the back of the truck, smelling evil sea, and broke a can off a sixer. He drank the first beer quicker than he meant to. Gone in a blink. He'd go home, soon enough, he just needed to clear his head of his thoughts, so he drank another. Ronnie O'Rourke and the town putting pressure on his kid already? Another. Jimmy was just a baby. Five years old. And another. Still into bedtime stories and all that.

He started to feel warm and that was no good. He wanted to be cold. So he took off his coat. He took a bottle of red wine from the
back of the truck and knocked the head off the bottle on the bumper of the truck and drank from the uneven, sharp-edged neck on the way down to the beach. He cut his lip. He walked along the water's edge and it ceased being about cooling off.

He stopped when he thought he had found the right spot, but of course he could never be sure, the beach was always changing. Much better at moving on than he. Todd lay down in the wet sand, the waves touching his feet on each incoming breath of water. Jimmy had been born three months after Suzie died. And so however many years his son had was also how long he'd been without his daughter. A curse in the numbers. Todd stared at the sky. He drank, pouring the wine straight into his mouth from arm's length, only bending his wrist. Red everywhere.

The seagulls screamed at him and the ballooned seaweed, tangled under his head, squeaked when he moved.

That Pacific Ocean up Oregon way, don't kid yourself, she's as cold as they come. As the tide came in farther Todd went numb. He rolled to his side, more weightless with each incoming wave. What a wonderful feeling for a man so used to causing tremors.
She had sand everywhere
, he remembered. Her ears and nose. He had hooked it out of her still-warm mouth with his pinkie. The tide was coming in now. He opened his mouth to the salty water. He swished it, tasted brine. Still, it was not enough to take his thinking away from his head, so with his numb fingers he scooped in the soupy sand and felt the grains jam deeply into the gaps of his teeth. It helped a little. He tried to swallow. Tasted fishy. He coughed and gagged. The polyester uniform with the Van Eyck logo on the front of the jacket turned dark blue, almost black, with the wetness of the sea.

•   •   •

The Kirkus family had only one car and it was parked down at the Van Eyck bottling plant. Bonnie couldn't give Genny a lift, she
was already at work, and Caleb, the one taxi driver in town, was on a cruise in Mexico, so that left the neighbors. However, after years of feuding with the Flying Finn and then Todd over street parking spaces and responsible lawn upkeep, bridges had been burned. Genny Mori couldn't bear the looks these neighbors would give her along with a ride.

So this new take-charge Genny Mori started walking, two boys in tow. It took an hour and a half, but they got there. All on their own, too. Who knew how many people actually saw her—up over the hill, past Peter Pan Park, down the other side, past the post office—and why no one offered to give her a lift, but rest assured everyone in town heard about it before nightfall.

You see poor Genny Mori and her two boys? Todd can't even get her a car of her own.

I saw her up by Peter Pan. The little, chunky one, Dexter? Poor girl had to carry him. I thought she'd be squished!

After all the chances that man had. And her, she was always so beautiful and smart—different, but pretty too.

She could have had things better. But you know her parents couldn't stick so I don't know what to think.

At the lot the van wouldn't start. Genny Mori got it going by having her boys both push against the back bumper while she pushed from the open driver's side door. Ages five and four, hands already dirty. The car lurched forward when the engine caught. Dex fell down, started to cry.

“Shut up a second,” Genny Mori said, leaning out of the van, engine revved. “We need to find your father.”

And Dex, skinned knees and all, he shut up.

There was a surety in Genny's thoughts that she knew exactly where her husband was—the same place he always ran to. Still, she strained to keep it a deniable surety. Genny Mori hadn't yet lost all she had for Todd. There was still enough lightning in his
bottle that she could hope for the shock of not finding him on the beach where their daughter had died. An electrical derivative formed from pity for what he'd witnessed and also guilt at her inability to feel as acutely as he had for the loss of their daughter rubbing together inside her. Also a hope that things were not as bad as they might be. She could pull up and find only sand and sea; and the only thing mourning would be the twisted driftwood left behind. Her husband could be waylaid somewhere with a flat tire—perfectly understandable, perfectly loveable. Not some man in a hurry to hurt, five years distant from the blow.

Still, at the edges, a black doubt that things
were
just as bad as she imagined. A slow-approaching cold front of anger that she felt for her husband. Their little girl never should have died. Their life would still be right side up, if not for him. It was a feeling she disallowed herself to feel—anger. Bonnie had told her that anger was the right way to feel. But no. Letting even just a little of that in would blow the hinges off the whole thing and she'd suffocate.

•   •   •

Jimmy had rarely ridden with his mother behind the wheel and he was surprised at how fast she went compared to his pops. He and Dex sat in the middle bench seat, not saying a word. Their eyes itched and Dex's jeans were ripped where he'd skinned his knees. Their mom turned the radio on, whistling as she drove. Jimmy watched her lips move in the mirror, wishing he could be closer. Maybe whistle along, or become the actual sounds that started in her mouth and ended in the air. It was a game he and Dex sometimes played. Pretend you're a dog, sleep on the floor. Pretend you're a storm, go blowing through the house. Pretend you're a bird, fly from chair to couch. Why couldn't he be his mother's sounds?

She knew exactly where she was headed, exactly where their pops had gone missing. In around twenty minutes they pulled up
behind a Van Eyck Pepsi truck in the otherwise empty parking lot of Area C where their pops's truck was.

Genny Mori moved with a quickness Jimmy couldn't pin to her. She was different than the mom who was always on the phone or sleeping large swaths of the day away. She took out two Pepsis from the back of the truck, rare treats for the boys whose father refused to feed them sweets, and shut the sliding door by pulling on the tether. She had to hang with all of her weight to get it to come down, but she got it. She could have gotten anything. Out of nowhere she was amazing. In all his years watching her, he hadn't seen this. “Drink these,” she said to her sons. “Wait here and don't go near that.” She pointed to the broke-off head of a decapitated wine bottle. “Jimmy, you're in charge while I'm gone.”

“OK,” Jimmy said. As he watched his mother climb over the dunes toward the beach, he thought,
I like her best now
.

All their lives they hadn't been allowed to go to the beach on account of what had happened to Suzie, but it was still a presence. Only nine miles away, on the sunny days it shined on the far-off horizon out their kitchen window like lamplights bounced off tinfoil. On the windy days salt air blew through Columbia City and across their faces. Far off. A made-up place. Now to actually be standing near sand, the ocean's roar in the background, it was overwhelming.

If it were up to Dex, they probably would have stayed in the parking lot and ripped through the Van Eyck truck, getting sugar-sick on pop. He was like that. However Jimmy knew something was wrong—horribly, horribly wrong—to make this big of a change in his mom this fast, and he was going to see what. He did something out of the ordinary—hell, the whole day was wobbly anyway—and he took charge. Off he went the same way his mom had gone.

“Where you going?” Dex asked over the top of his Pepsi bottle, breath catching a whistle at its lip.

“For a walk.”

“Mom told us stay; she said.”

“OK, Dexy, stay here.”

Jimmy went to the dunes. It was strange, to sink in the sand when he walked. He felt foreign in his own body. Used muscles he didn't know he had.

“Wait, Jimmy!” Dex yelled and started to run, but the bottle slipped from his hands and shattered on the cement parking lot. He stopped and watched brown soda fizzle at his feet. He started to run again, crying, to catch up to his brother. He fell many times in the strange sand.