The Nirvana Blues (56 page)

“I don't know. A bunch of guys jumped me.”

“What guys, where?”

“They beat him up on the playground,” Heather said. “It was Triple Threat Tucker, and Tofu Smatterling, and—”

“You shuttup, you little shithead!” Michael snapped angrily. “Nobody asked you!”

“I can talk if I want to. It's a free country.”

“I'll
kill
you if you open that fat mouth of yours one more time!” Michael threatened.

“I'm not ascared of you.” Heather inspected her nails calmly from yet another disinterested angle. “You're not even as big as flyshit.”

Joe said, “Heather!”

“That's my name, don't wear it out.”

“Jesus Christ!” Joe wailed. “What's the matter with you kids? I asked a simple question. Michael has a broken nose. As your father it seems to me I've got a right to know who smashed it, and how, and why.”

“It was just some kids.” Embarrassed by the attention, Michael had turned crimson. “That's all.”

“What kids?” Joe neglected to add: I'll kill them, I'll sue their parents, I'll track them down and beat them into bloody pulps with my plumber's wrench!

“Just some guys.” Michael squirmed. “I don't remember who.”

“I told you,” Heather said. “It was Triple Threat and Tofu Smatterling and Boo Tenace and Jonah Nordica—”

“You shuttup, Heather, or I'll stick your head in the toilet and flush it!”

Joe's bleatings were almost incoherent. “Why did they jump you? Why did they want to break your nose?”

“I dunno.…”

“It's 'cause he shot Sasha.” Heather dabbed at her left pinkie nail. “It's 'cause he fucked up the unbailing of the Hanuman.”

“Un
veil
ing, sweetie. Un
veil
ing.”

“That's what I said, unbailing.”

“No, listen to me—you're getting sidetracked by the labial
b.
It's not a
buh
sound, it's a
vuh
sound … Heather, dammit,
look up when I'm talking to you!
”

Taking her own sweet time, she lifted veiled eyes that spewed at him innuendos of bald recalcitrance, boredom, and hostility.

The bedroom door opened and Heidi appeared, hair half covering her eyes and fluffed in sleepy disarray. She wore white cotton briefs and a tattered Snoopy sweatshirt.

“What did you do?” she croaked hoarsely. “You weren't tormenting us enough from a distance so you had to return and twist the needles in person?”

His jaw dropped. Unjustly accused, adjudged guilty for a heinous crime he'd had absolutely no intention of committing, outrageously misunderstood and cavalierly dumped back into the excrement at just that moment when he had felt himself shining, clean, winged, and ready to soar, Joe stammered nonsensically for a beat, then located his tongue:

“Wait a minute, what is this—a loony bin? When I opened the door, all I held in my heart was love. All I wanted was peace and forgiveness and just a minute to make my case. But you lame-brained piranha fish won't even allow me five words on my own behalf.”

Heidi said, “Let me get this straight. You came back here with love in your heart in order to call us ‘lame-brained piranha fish'?”

“I didn't
plan
to call you anything, dammit! I planned to enter this house with a little humility and see if maybe we couldn't patch things up. Instead, I'm greeted by a trio of wiseasses who can't shut up long enough to hear my apologies because they're too busy scoring points.”

“I was asleep, Joey. Don't include me in your accusation. I was trying to rest because I'm a bit exhausted, in case you're interested. And then you swagger in here, bellowing at the top of your voice—”

“Oh no you don't. I wasn't ‘swaggering.' I was calm and cool and collected. Then I happened to notice that my kid's face is swaddled in bandages, so I asked who did the damage, that's all. But do you think either one of these mongoloids here would give a straight answer?”

“I gave you a straight answer,” Heather protested. “I know who did it. I saw it happen!”

“Squealer!” Michael spat with astonishing vehemence. “Stool pigeon!”

Joe said, “You mean you watched them break his nose and you didn't even try to help him?”

“They were all bigger than me!” Heather's arrogant eyes widened in outraged innocence.

“I wouldn't want any help from any girl anyway,” Michael said.

Joe turned on him. “What's the matter with a girl? Why did you say that?”

Michael had received enough feminist brainwashing to realize he'd made a cavernous goof. In lieu of defending himself, he clammed up.

“Women happen to be just as good fighters as men.” Joe wondered unhappily how in the name of God Almighty they had landed on
this
particular rap! “Not only do they make good doctors and excellent parachute jumpers, but they are also exceptional warriors. Who do you think did half the fighting in Vietnam, enabling that backward, poorly equipped country to defeat the most powerful military machine ever assembled? Who do you think makes up half the Chinese army? Who do you think some of the most skilled black-belt karate experts in the world are? Women! That's who they are!”

“Yeah,” Heather chimed in. “Women hold up half the sky, y'know.”

Joe ordered his daughter to stifle. “You don't have to goad him any more than you already have.”

Dripping venomous sarcasm, Heidi said, “That's right, Heather, darling. Despite Daddy's liberal rhetoric, he doesn't want you ever to forget that little girls should be seen, not heard.”

Joe protested. “Wait a minute. I don't see any reason why she has a right to taunt Michael while I'm reading him a riot act.”

“So you told her to shut up. Of course, why not? Men have been telling women to shut up for ten thousand years.”

“She's not a ‘woman,' she's a little child. On top of that, sometimes—including right now—she's a real brat! And besides, I can't make her be quiet any other way. She never listens to me. Michael never listens to me. You never listen to me. In fact,
nobody
ever listens to me. I might as well scream at the stars.”

“Why don't you try
not
screaming, for once. You might find communication would improve immensely. It seems that your method of making a point is to yell so loud everybody's intimidated whether they think you make any sense or not.”

Joe said, “I give up, I really do. You win. I don't believe it. I blew it again, you're right, it's incredible, I'm sorry, good-bye.”

“Wait a minute. Don't leave.”

“Why? What can I accomplish here?” Those old debbil tears commenced again. “All I have to do is cross the threshold, and everybody acts like I'm a fox that just entered the chicken coop looking for a fat pullet.
Frenzy! Feathers everywhere! Cackle, cackle, cackle!
”

“I hate to say this, but you bring most of it on yourself.”

“I know. I got lousy karma, right? Last week, what was his name, that freak from Alexander's Ragtime Crash Pad? He was walking down the highway shoulder at ten
P.M.
when a car of teen-agers pulled over, jumped out, and beat him insensate with clubs, chains, and hammers. Now he's lying in the Our Lady of the Sorrows Hospital paralyzed from the neck down and doomed to be a vegetable forever. So I'm sitting in the Prince of Whales—when was it? I guess about last Thursday—talking about it with several people, among them Jeff Orbison and Spumoni Tatarsky, when you know what that fucking Spumoni said?”

They stared at him.

“You know what he actually
said
to me?”

Michael shook his head. Heather locked her eyes expectantly into her father's face. Heidi said, “What?”

For dramatic emphasis, Joe added, “I mean, you know, these are supposed to be semi-intelligent human beings we're dealing with here. Granted, Spumoni is a trifle weird, but the guy actually went to college; he's got a piece of paper says he earned a degree. And Jeff?—that man actually has a doctorate. He's a PhD!”

Joe halted: they waited.

“So you know what went down?” he repeated, enraged, the spittle flying.

“For God's sake, what?”

It happened. The entire lesson—the point of his story, the thing he wished to prove—abruptly dislodged from his brain and slid sideways. Joe drew a blank. In the heart of his rage, at the apex of his moral, he blew it. Mouth hanging open, he stared back at them, perplexed, slightly bemused, and then horrified. On the threshold of an important punch line, his mind had bailed out.

Dumbfounded, Joe remained frozen, his hands raised in a pertinent gesture the reason for which he had completely forgotten. After a few puzzling seconds had ticked away, he had to admit: “I forget.”

“What do you mean, you forget?”

“I forget what I meant to say. I don't even remember what I was talking about.”

“Karma.”

“Karma?” It rang no bell.

“Yeah, karma. And Jeff Orbison's PhD.”

“But why? I mean, I was on the brink of saying something important.…”

“You were talking about that guy from Alexander's Ragtime Crash Pad who they almost killed last week,” Heather offered.

“I know that, dummy. But what was the
point?
” Joe knuckled his eyes, then ran fingers back through his hair, guessing that sometime over the past few days he must have been deftly lobotomized by some duendi prankster employed by that particular devil in charge of ridiculing dignity and promoting overt idiocy and shame.

Heidi said, “You baffle me, Joey. One minute you're talking about chicken feathers everywhere, next minute you're ranting about some wounded jerk from Alexander's Ragtime Crash Pad.”

“Yeah, but why? I mean, there was a point. The freak, and the crash pad, and Spumoni Tatarsky.…”

Bewildered and defeated, Joe sat down. Or anyway, he started to settle into their lumpy Salvation Army chair when Heather shrieked,
“Daddy, don't!”

Don't what—rape her? Plunk down atop a venomous cobra? Set his butt into a fauteuil booby-trapped with punji sticks or the kind of plastic device used by renegade French army officers protesting Algerian independence?

Joe halted, shaped like a question mark, halfway there.

“You're gonna sit on Baby Erica!”

Grappling beneath himself, Joe located a small raggedy doll wrapped in wax paper and pincushioned with needles. A paper taped on her forehead said: “Erika, kidnee and hart.”

“We were playing hospital,” Heather explained. “Erica's sick.”

Distastefully, Joe assessed the doll. “What's with all the needles?”

“She's getting a cute puncher for her kidney.”

“A what?”

“A cute puncher for her kidney. That's what the Chinese people do. They put you on a table and stick needles inside you and it makes you better. They can even stick a needle in your neck and cut your brain open if they want.”

“Acupuncture.” Joe slumped wearily into the chair. “The word, Heather, is acupuncture.”

“That's what I said, a cute puncher.”

Superior Michael begged to differ. “It's not ‘a cute puncher,' Heather, you moron. It's ‘acupuncture,' just like Daddy said.”

“I am not a moron. You're a moron—”

“Quiet!” Joe literally wrung his hands. “We really don't need to argue over who's a moron right now. It's not in the script.”

From the refrigerator, Heidi selected a beer. She offered the can to Joe: “Want one?”

“Sure, why not? Beer makes it great.”

She remained there, her knee propping open the door as she pensively scanned the Frigidaire's jumbled innards. Apparently, she had decided to drive him crazy, for nothing rattled Joe more than to see somebody wasting God knows how much electricity (one-sixteenth of one-tenth of one-half a milliwatt?), and spoiling God knows how much food (one-tenth of one cell in a celery stick?), by gratuitously leaving the refrigerator door ajar. It had long been a heavy bone of contention between them. Heidi could watch the inside of a refrigerator the same way most people gooned at television.

“Heidi, maybe if you leave the refrigerator door open long enough an owl will fly in and start nesting.”

She replied, “I can't decide what I want—but I've got it narrowed down to one of two things, either the strychnine or the cyanide.”

“Very funny.”

“You started it with your snide owl comment.”

“Well, in case you didn't notice, electricity costs money.”

“Joey, if I hold the refrigerator door open for twenty seconds, what's that going to cost extra at the end of the month—eighteen demimils?”

He was too tired to answer. Ten minutes inside this house, and already his body, which had arrived in the pink of condition, was dismally fatigued.

Michael abandoned his puzzle and whispered in Heather's ear. She listened raptly, then asked, “Daddy, are you gonna wrestle with us tonight?”

“Sure, why not? Maybe I can bash Michael's nose so bad he winds up breathing from his asshole.”

“
Da
-ddy!”

“I'm all right,” Michael pleaded urgently. “You won't bug my nose. It doesn't hurt at all.”

“So let's leave it like that. Thank God for small favors.”

“Aw, Daddy…”

“But I'm okay,” Michael insisted. “I won't even let my head get near you. I'll just wrestle with my feet.”

“Lemme paint for you the scenario,” Joe said wearily. “Eighteen seconds after we begin, I heave Heather off my chest, and she lands on top of you, who've got me in a scissors grip. Quite by accident, of course, her elbow, driving backwards and downwards to break her fall, drills into your shnoz like a jackhammer, not only rebreaking your nose, but sending ninety-seven razor-sharp splinters of cartilage and bone up into your brain, either killing you instantly, or damaging that part of the cerebellum controlling your immunity system, meaning that for the rest of your life you'll have to live in a germ-free bubble, which will cost us all our savings in the first three weeks.…”