The Home for Wayward Clocks (35 page)

His initial thought at lunch was just to go through a drive-through and eat on the road. But when he pulled up to the loudspeaker, he realized he couldn’t hear when the people inside were talking, asking what he wanted. “I’m sorry!” James yelled out the window toward the microphone. “I forgot I can’t hear. I’ll have to come in.” When he drove through the checkout, he ducked his head, sure everyone inside was laughing.

He didn’t really feel safe until he got to the hotel. Turning on the television, he stretched out on the bed. The faces on the screen, moving and talking and waving their arms in a black silent void, kept him company. He thought about phoning home, to let everyone know he arrived safely and to make sure that everything was okay, but then he realized he wouldn’t be able to hear when someone answered.

Restless, James’ eyes wandered the walls and he knew he was looking for his clocks. James needed something to watch, something with rhythm. But there was nothing on these walls, nothing but screwed-on scenic paintings and a mirror. James sat up, feeling dizzy, and grabbed onto the bedspread. Planting his feet on the floor, he tried to feel grounded, but things blurred all around. Swinging his head, his eyes darting, James noticed a flash of red and zoomed in on it. It was the radio alarm clock next to the bed and the colon between the hours and minutes flashed the slow beat of seconds passing. Sliding onto the floor, James knelt in front of the bedside table and watched the dots blinking and he put his hand on his chest and felt his heartbeat. Eventually, the room stopped spinning and James’ whole world slid down onto those two dots. He controlled his breathing, wiped the cold sweat off his forehead, then climbed back onto the bed. Rolling onto his side, he turned the clock so that he could keep watching it.

It was going to be a long wait until Monday.

S
unday, James ventured out for a little while. Chicago was so big, he shrunk to nothing and didn’t go much farther than a couple blocks. Just far enough to find a restaurant. He carried his notebook in case he needed someone to answer a question or give directions.

On the way back to his room after lunch, James spotted an antique store down a side street. Abandoned Here, it was called. James liked the sound of that and so he went inside. A man behind the counter smiled around his cigar and then said something, but James just lifted his hand in a wave. The store was bigger than it looked on the outside and James roamed down the haphazard aisles. There didn’t seem to be any left or right, up or down, just aisles spreading this way and that and then intersecting with others. It didn’t take too long for James to get lost, but he felt okay. He knew he was in this store and he saw a few clocks and so he knew he was among friends. The aroma of the man’s cigar, a rich rum and tobacco smell, followed wherever James went and at times, he took a deep breath and drew it deep into his lungs. James’ father used to smoke a cigar and the scent calmed him. He tried smoking one himself when he was seventeen, but he couldn’t handle the taste. It was amazing how the taste of something could be so different than the smell. Yet James liked tobacco shops and often stopped in, just to breathe and remember small glimpses of his dad. Sitting in his father’s lap, his voice deep around James, reading a story. Playing with James on the nights his mother disappeared, giving him a bath, making bubbles into tall wet hats or fragrant necklaces that dripped down to his chest. Tucking James in at night.

James remembered well the morning his father left, a foggy morning when James was eight years old “I know what happens, son,” his father said and he ran his finger around James’ throat, touching the latest collar burn. “I’m going to find us a place far away and I’ll get it all set up. Then I’ll come back for you.” He paused for a moment and then answered the question that was held back, incoherent, by a voice choked with little boy tears. “It won’t be for much longer. I might have to sell the car to get us somewhere and we’d have to walk to get away and that’s just too far for a little guy like you. I’ll get as far as I can, then sell the car and walk farther, get us a place, then I’ll figure out how to get you.”

James wanted to say that he could walk just as far as his father could, that James could run to keep up, and that if he couldn’t, he could be carried on his father’s shoulders, the way he did sometimes, making James feel tall and strong with his father’s body like his own flowing beneath him. But James’ voice remained stuck as if he still wore the collar, sealing off his breath. So James just closed his eyes and when he opened them, his father was gone.

James kept waiting for him to come home. All through the progression of collars, from leather to choke, to a cage, a tether, beatings with a brush, then a belt. James was seventeen when his mother told him his dad was dead, struck by a truck as he walked on the side of a highway nine years before, in the early morning when there was a fog. A fog that hid him, kept him from finding a place far away that was safe and quiet, that had no root cellar. James cried and hated crying because he was seventeen and too old for such things, and he told his mother that she lied, that his father was coming back, coming back to get him. She laughed and said he was buried in town, in the little cemetery behind the Catholic church. “Go and see,” she said.

“Then why don’t I remember a funeral?” James asked.

“I didn’t have one,” she said. “Just buried him, because I had to. He didn’t deserve it, he was running away. What kind of a boy wants a father who leaves him?”

Something in her voice, so deep and derisive, so hateful, made James stand straight that day, straight for the first time in his life, pull all his nearly adult bones in order, throwing off the beaten slump, the rounded shoulders, the lowered head. And he realized he looked down on her. She came to the bottom of his chin. She looked up too, seeming to recognize James’ height for the first time, and for a moment, her face changed from its feline sneer to the glistening wide eyes of a rodent. James knew the look, he felt it on his own features often enough, saw it on his face when he combed his hair in the morning before school and found her in his reflection. It was fear. Yet then she slitted her eyes and the cat came back and she silently pointed toward the root cellar.

James hit her. Just once, but he hit her full in the face. It was enough to knock her backwards on the ground and she lay flat on the grass, her nose flowing red over her lips and teeth. And then James left.

It was as easy as that.

So easy that he wondered what force held him, curled in a box in the root cellar, for all those years when all he had to do was take off the collar and run. Run like his father.

His father who was supposed to come back. And save James. It never occurred to James to save himself until the hero was gone. Buried without ceremony in the back of the Catholic church.

And now in this shop, in the middle of Abandoned Here, the cigar smoke wrapped itself around James and he felt his father’s hand again covering his own. James welcomed him in, even though he was so, so late.

Turning a corner, James found himself in an aisle that looked familiar and he realized he must have gone in a circle, an odd angled circle. He was about to turn down the opposite way when a movement caught his eye. It was a gold flash, a wave from a bottom shelf and he bent down to look. And he found a skeleton clock.

James didn’t like skeleton clocks because of their nakedness, baring everything they had to the world. When he lifted this clock from the shelf, he could see its entire workings; there was no shiny gold or wood skin covering its most private of parts. It was undressed and as such, vulnerable. It was mounted on a black and white marble base and a glass dome fit snugly over it, tucked into grooves in the marble, to protect all the exposed parts from the dust and grime in everyday air. James was always put to mind of strippers when he saw this type of clock, strippers moving on a stage, all the parts undulating and swinging and swaying. James was never in a strip joint, but he could imagine and these clocks left nothing to the imagination.

But this time, when James raised the clock to a higher shelf so it was eye-level, he felt something different. It stood stocky and solid and its plates and metalwork were cut in a gothic cathedral style. Everything was erect in this clock, moving skyward, and James could see every cog and pinion moving, interlocking, pushing the clock’s life ahead second by second. The pendulum, round and smooth like a jeweled belly button, swung seriously left to right and James’ eyes settled on it and his heart moved with it and in a second, he and the clock were connected.

While this clock was naked, it was splendid and it held everything it had toward James. While he watched, it glowed, and its movements matched James’ breath and settled him into safety. Carefully, James lifted the glass dome and then turned the clock, getting as much of its workings into his vision as possible. The feel of the gears beneath his hands made him shiver. James wasn’t home, but home was here, present in the bare bones of a clock.

He didn’t even check the price. He didn’t care.

Cradling it against his chest, James moved slowly through the rest of the store. There were plenty of clocks, all old, all in various states of repair. Some moved happily and clearly, others had hands that were stuck on a permanent hour and minute. Most were very reasonably priced. James saw by the other objects around the shop that clocks were not a specialty for this storeowner…the high-priced items were stained glass figurines and windows and lampshades, all throwing paths of red and green and gold light on the floor. One path glowed marvelously purple and James looked up to see a huge arch of window, standing free from a wall, apparently extricated from a church. James thought he was near the center of the store and there was a bright light shining from somewhere, through this misplaced stained glass, and the thing shone with a life of its own.

While it and the other pieces were beautiful, they weren’t clocks. And it was to James’ benefit…the proprietor didn’t know how much to charge. James knew he could probably talk the prices down even lower, but standing there in the purple light, he decided not to. The items were Abandoned Here and the cigar-smoking man saw fit to care for them. The clocks were already priced much lower than they should have been. James didn’t want to take advantage of a good heart.

Working his way back to the counter, James set the skeleton clock down. “Would you by any chance have a good-sized cardboard box?” he asked the man. “I collect clocks and I’ve seen a good number I’m interested in and I can’t carry them all.” The man nodded and scrounged beneath the counter, coming up with a solid box. “Thank you,” James said. The man answered around his glowing cigar and James shook his head. “I’m sorry, I can’t hear. I lost my hearing recently through an accident.” James handed over the notebook. “Can you write what you just said?”

The man frowned for a second, then grabbed a pen and began to write. The cigar was clenched tightly in his teeth, the smoke curling like a gray coil to the ceiling. Then he returned the notebook. “You can leave this clock up here if you want,” he wrote.

“Oh,” James said and looked at the little skeleton. He was torn about leaving it, it felt so good against his chest where the movement swung in time with his own pulse. But it made sense to leave it there, rather than jostling it around the store. “You won’t sell it to anyone else who comes in?”

The cigar man shook his head.

“All right, thank you.” James patted the little clock, then moved around the store again. The clocks were hard to say no to and it didn’t take long before the box was filled. Retracing his steps to the counter, James requested another. The cigar man raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

James was on his way back with the filled second box when he spotted one more clock. It was tucked away on a corner shelf, near the back, but the light shining through a red pane of stained glass caught it and its wood turned to fire. James set the box down and carefully scooped the small clock up.

It was an exquisite miniature mantel clock. It fit neatly in James’ open palms, its humpback rising in a sensual curve. The heft and shine of the wood bragged it was mahogany and the clockface was a dim brass, just begging to be polished. The roman numerals were etched and graceful and the hands were a swirl like filigree. But holding it, James felt something was missing. He held it to his cheek. No rhythm. James felt nothing at all.

Turning it, he opened the little back and saw that the insides were completely cleared out. This clock was basically just a case, a shell, all the heart and soul of it gone. James stood there for a second and thought about this, this glorious body of a clock compared to the bare skeleton of the one who waited on the counter. He touched it again, running a single finger gently over its body, then cupping his palm over the rounded mound of its curve. In an instant, James was transformed back to a warm bed with Diana. His hand over this wood could have been over the softness of her breast and James felt his pulse quicken.

And then it hit him.

This clock was small, a miniature, a clock movement inside had to be a certain size. A size like James had at home, resting on a bed of lamb’s wool. Diana’s clock. Diana’s clock movement tucked away inside this body that reminded James of the warmth and softness of her breast. Her heart making this brass face glow again, the hands move like a smooth caress over the numbers.

James stroked the clock again and had trouble breathing for a moment as everything shifted and settled back into place. Then his body relaxed, each muscle shaking loose and then wrapping itself around his bones. It could all work.

Returning to the counter, James set the box down. “That’s it,” he said to the cigar man, who laughed. The man reached for the notebook and wrote, “That’s IT? You’ve about picked up every clock in the place.”

Together, James and the cigar man took newspaper and tucked it in and around the clocks to protect them on the way back to the hotel and later, to home. James was careful with them all, but especially with the skeleton and the miniature mantel. There was everything to protect in the skeleton and nothing at all in the mantel, but he felt they both needed him and so they got an extra cushion of paper.