Rules for Becoming a Legend (6 page)

It's five in the morning and Jimmy hasn't yet been called the nickname that will dog him wherever he goes:
Kamikaze Kirkus
. It'll come soon enough though. By this morning's first class, kids will be whispering the strange story of Jimmy Kirkus and the gym wall. Adults will be talking in hushed tones. It'll be on the lips of everyone. It will snowball, include the basketball feats of
his childhood, the drama of his parents' lives, getting bigger all the time until it takes in things that have no relation to the things he actually did. Until it's about someone who seems nothing like our kid Jimmy. Until it's an avalanche.

And he'll never try and stop it.

Saturday, December 1, 1990

JIMMY KIRKUS NOT YET BORN—SEVENTEEN YEARS UNTIL THE WALL.

A
weekend morning and the world was their lumpy, king-sized bed. Room happy in its disarray. Todd's Van Eyck uniform flung over the door to the closest, a shed skin, while other things of all sizes—from a little girl's shoe to a woman's black stockings, strung out and runny on the windowsill—lay about. Comfort in the chaotic domesticity. Todd blinked his eyes, still somewhat sealed with sleep. He rolled over, slowly—his bladder full—and found Genny's hip with his palm. From this reference point he traveled northwest and found the beginning swell of her pregnant belly. Another baby on the way; a boy, Todd hoped.

“Quit it,” Genny said. She waved back with her left arm and hit him in the side.

“Oof.” A burning fullness swelled out from the impact. Todd hadn't peed the bed since he couldn't remember when, but just then, almost.

Genny leaned up, suddenly awake. “Are you OK?”

“My teeth are floating is what.”

She laughed and lay her head back down. “I almost popped the balloon?”

Todd got up and shuffled through the drifts of his adult life—dirty laundry, coffee mug, small stack of bills—toward the bathroom. “It could have been bad for you, too.”

“At this point, I wouldn't care.”

The worst part of their house on Glasgow was that there was no bathroom attached to their bedroom. Todd had to scoot down a little hallway—always a chill here—and enter the bathroom via a swollen, likely to stick, impossible-to-keep-quiet door across from the pantry. It would take a miracle to use the bathroom without alerting the whole house that he was awake. And then it would be Suzie jumping up and down, singing whatever song she'd picked up from the morning's cartoons, demanding a detailed itinerary of the day's events. If not that then the Flying Finn would come in, probably just in his boxers, eating graham crackers or something, crumbs all over the place. They would be listening for the creak of that bathroom door, even if they didn't know they were. Todd had done the same thing when he was a kid and that room was Finn's.

Out in the living room he heard the purring click of the Wheel of Fortune spinning on the TV in the living room. Todd was absolutely certain
Wheel of Fortune
didn't play at eight a.m. on a Saturday. It had to be one of the Flying Finn's tapes. Todd wondered how the old man had persuaded Suzie to switch away from
Looney Tunes
, or whatever.

Todd reached out and turned the knob to the bathroom all of the way, anticipating the latch clicking. Next he stepped forward and put his bare foot at the base of the doorway, so that when he pulled, the clear section, near the bottom, wouldn't come out before the swollen section nearer the top. Next he gave the door little jerks, easing it out centimeter by centimeter until, blessed be thee of wood and brass, it came away quietly. Todd stepped in, sat down for his piss to minimize noise, and was back in the bedroom with no one the wiser.

The warmth around Genny was delicious, and the moment he settled in next to her he was able to regain the just-below-the-surface sleepiness that was the best part of waking up.

“Is the old goat watching
Wheel of Fortune
?” Genny asked.

“I think it's one of his tapes.”

“Why would anyone watch a game show more than once?”

“His name is, legit I mean, the Flying Finn, so watching game shows on tape is basically par for the course.”

“Legit, like it's legal?” She turned around to face him. She goosed his ribs so he shot out his arms and held her, brought her close, conformed to the curved shape of her body. “In a court of law?”

“You know what I mean.”

Then the door burst open and Suzie came running in carrying something bleached white in each hand. “Look it, look it, look it!” she yelled.

Genny pulled away from Todd—the successful coup of sneaking into the bathroom all for nothing—and smiled down at their daughter. Todd rolled away, arm draped over his eyes, trying to dunk himself back under the waterline. “What is it?”

“Grandpa gave it to me if I didn't watch 'toons.”

“Jesus,” Genny said—and in this one word Todd heard the business end of his wife come out and was thrust onto dry land, totally awake. “Todd?”

He sat up and looked at what his daughter held. It didn't correlate with anything he recognized until he tilted his head to the left and saw the grin. His little girl, sweet chickadee of summer and light, was holding the skull and separated jawbone of a long-dead cow. “Whoa, Grandpa gave that to you?”

“Your father . . .” Genny was whispering savagely.

“It's for my white collection,” Suzie said—the
ct
in collection coming out as an
sh
sound.

“That's great, baby, but do you know what that is?” His daughter, ever since she had been able to get around on her own, had gathered things together that caught her eye. This magpie tendency
had become color-coded in the last six months and the habit only seemed on course to get more sophisticated going forward.

“Moo-cow's head,” she said seriously. “He's dead now.”

Then the Flying Finn was in the doorway with a jar of peanut butter in one hand, scooping out the last bits with the other. Todd and Genny still in bed, people coming in, this felt like John and Yoko.

“Mori”—this was how his father always referred to his wife—“almost no peanut butter.”

“A cow's skull, Finn?” Genny said.

“Oh, so you want she's playing with the pink dolls!” He was mock-outraged, peanut butter caught in his whiskers. It was a joke between them. Whenever they saw little girls around Suzie's age, all trussed up in ribbon and lace, they conspired about where else a bow could conceivably be tied—around the knee, on each ear?

“Get your own peanut butter!” Genny yelled, halfway ready to laugh, but not there yet.

“Get out of our room, Dad.”

“This was my room one time!” he yelled back, already on his way out.

“Go watch your reruns!”

“It's practice for when Vannah calls. Then you see the laughing, and it'll all be me!”

“Daddy, let's go to the beach! For collecting!”

Genny collapsed back into bed. “Can you take her? Maybe I can sleep a bit more.”

“Yes, let's go, let's go!” his daughter said.

Todd kissed his wife on the cheek, tucked the sheets in around her. She smiled back, already sailing. “Wash the damn cow skull,” she whispered.

•   •   •

Beach was winter white. Bleached driftwood and white-capped waves. Blown-out sand sculptures formed around things washed
up and forgotten. The littlest piece of trash, or stick, or turned-over cup grew in the drifts of sand until it seemed big enough to hide a creature. Some malformed thing waiting to scuttle forth and eat when the time was right. Passing rain squalls dumped parts of their burden on their journey inland, patterns in many-cratered pointillism.

Todd watched Suzie run in the sand, so small she seemed unreal, collecting the things she found in the basket she made with the front of her T-shirt. She had her blue jacket unzipped and it flapped in the gusts. When she turned a certain way, the wind flipped it completely up, and it looked like his daughter was hanging by the armholes as her jacket tugged her into the heavens.

“You stay close,” Todd called out on that last day.

“OK, Daddy,” she yelled back, not even looking.

He chuckled to himself. Little, pretty, Suzanna. A startling thing he called Suzie Q. Baby girl born so cute nobody was safe. Even the most checked-out teenage boys stopped to coo at little Suzie.

It was the last day Todd was fully happy. Oh there would be other days of pleasantness, surges of positive feeling, but this was the final time he was filled all the way up. He lay back in the sand and crossed his ankles, a practice Genny Mori said would give him varicose veins. She was always saying things like this. It was how she told him she loved him. He crossed them anyway and sighed. What a luxury. The people of Columbia City had finally started seeing him for who he had become rather than what he could have. They asked him questions about little Suzie instead of rehab on his knee. There were no illusions of a basketball comeback. No pipe dreams of an NBA star hailing from their town. Not anymore.

The beach was empty and surprisingly warm in that Oregon way—that is, only when the wind slacked for a moment. Todd thought he felt his spine aligning into a straighter form as he sank
into the sand and the wind built banks of it at his side, working hard at covering him up. His little girl was safe, in his sight, scampering to driftwood logs, stealing the treasures caught in the little wet caves of their sides. His wife was home, pregnant with their second, probably studying at the kitchen table, going to be a nurse. Another child had been Todd's idea. “Suzie's lonely,” he'd said. Life was in order so he let his blinks linger a little longer. A little longer still. Small curtains of sand ran over his nose. In a day or two, hell, he'd become just another mysterious shape hidden by the beach. It was hard work at Van Eyck Beverages. Loading case after case. And soon he was asleep.

Some time later—how much he didn't know then, but would spend many years trying to calculate—he jolted awake. He stood. Blood stuck in his legs made way for his head. His whole body was tingling, asleep or dead. He looked out and saw an empty beach.

“Suzie?” he yelled. And then yelled again. Nothing. He scanned the beach. Empty. He had the sudden thought that she'd been kidnapped so he rushed up the sandy dunes in the direction of the parking lot. His old gray minivan was there and nothing else. He felt his weak knee, watery with pain. He turned and was back on the ridge of the dune, looking down at the ocean and the sky and the harried little waves that came in. Gray, white, white. He looked far to the left and then to the right and it was the same. Gray, white, white. Gray, white, white. Then. Blue.

Her blue coat.

She had needed a new one growing as fast as she was, so they took her to Fred Meyer and she chose her own.

“Which one do you like, honey?” Genny Mori had asked.

Suzie ran down the aisle and stopped in front of a bright blue one. “Blue, blue!”

Todd came up behind her. “OK, blue, we get it, OK.” He picked
the tag, looked at the price, and then let go as if it were hot. “Jesus.” He showed it to Genny.

“Think this is bad, just wait till high school.” They shared a laugh at that. Not much, but no matter. Sometimes enough really is enough.

•   •   •

There was a big driftwood log shifting and half-caught in the water. The tide had come in a ways since they arrived and the ocean seemed intent on sucking that big log out to sea. There. Blue. Todd saw so clearly. A bright blue sleeve pinned by the log. It floated as lazily as the seaweed around it. He started running. There was her hand—small—sticking out of the end of the sleeve. So electric white it could have been plugged in.

Todd “Freight Train” Kirkus ran faster. The watery pain in his knee spread to his heart.

•   •   •

They had the funeral the next week—a rainy Thursday. The Flying Finn disappeared shortly after. Todd found all his tapes in the garbage, their gutted ribbons pooling, tangled, around them. Todd called the police and they found him three days later south of town, in Cannon Beach, walking along 101. He didn't want to come home, so they let him be.

Meanwhile, the Flying Finn's restaurant—Finn's Kitchen—out on Pier 11 was shut down, the lease taken up by someone opening a place called the Crab Shack. Todd sold his father's kitchen equipment in one lot. The buyer made out like a thief.

•   •   •

The memory stayed with Todd forever. As vivid as if it had always just happened. Her little blue sleeve in the water, the huge gray log lolling back and forth on top of her, playing or lustful. Close his eyes for a second and he had his own private hell. It left him broke-hearted and Genny Mori cracked-but-not-broke-hearted.

And that was the big difference between the two parents. Todd was shattered completely. The very conception of himself as a good man, a good father, destroyed. This void invited filling, and so Todd focused himself—with the coming of a new baby boy—on building himself back up from ruin into a workable, though paranoid father. Genny Mori on the other hand, because she wasn't there when her daughter died, because she had an easier time dissociating herself from the blame, only had her heart cracked. Badly, but still structurally sound. Over time she knitted emotional scar tissue over it to make do. And make do kept on until it was status quo.

It seemed to her in the first few weeks after Suzie died that she had lost a part of her own body as real as any limb or organ. Suzie was of her own flesh so that when she laughed, Genny felt it too. Then suddenly her little child, a piece of her, was gone forever. Things like her remembered laugh became phantom limbs that ached just as much and as real as any of her own.

An awful pact with life
, she thought. You divide yourself so this little child can have a chance, but then it's not like any other part of the body. You can never keep this part of you close enough and safe enough. Life was a puller by nature, and it pulled and pulled and pulled until that little part of you, that little child that was the best part of you, was pulled away. And there was nothing you could do to really protect that little best part of you because even though it felt like a piece of you and looked like a piece of you, it wasn't you. And if Genny Mori was learning one thing, it was this: only count on what is truly you, because that's the only thing you have total control of.

And so with Jimmy on the way, Genny Mori withdrew as far into herself as she could, hoping the baby took little, or better yet, nothing of her because she didn't think she could stand to be divided, to be wrest of her own self again.