The Throwback Special (3 page)

Andy turned off his wipers. He remained in his car with the engine running, pretending to inspect the bottom of his cleats. He held a shoe in one hand, and with the other he used a ballpoint pen to scrape at imaginary dirt around the studs. He had cleaned the cleats carefully earlier in the week, and of course he had cleaned them after the last time he had worn them, a year ago. They were very clean. He wasn't ready to go inside yet, and he was trying to give the impression to any possible witnesses that he was busy and content here alone in his parked and running car. Through the curtain of rain on his windshield he thought he saw George, the public librarian, doing calisthenics on a berm. George was someone Andy did not want to see. George's thin gray ponytail was just ridiculous, never more so than when trickling out of a football helmet. Whenever anyone asked George how he was doing or how his year had been, he always replied the same way: “Just doing my thing.” Then he would talk, in a slow and agonizingly thoughtful way, about budget cuts at both the state and local levels, the power of information, the marketplace
of ideas, the future of the book, the public's appetite for memoir, the digital divide, and, worst of all, the First Amendment. Andy hated talking to librarians, and he did not want to be hugged. He cut his engine, not unlike an animal playing dead. He worked earnestly and with renewed vigor at the pretend mud in his cleats. A sudden vaporous notion—he should not have come—dissipated before it could condense into conviction. He kept his head down, hoped George would menace someone else with his idealistic interpretations of devastating factual evidence.

There was a tap on the passenger-side window. Andy looked up to see George giving him what he believed to be the first peace sign he had ever seen outside of documentary footage. George's face was so close to the window that he was fogging the glass.

“Hi, George,” Andy mumbled. He kept the doors shut, the windows raised.

“Andy!” George said.

“How's it going?”

“Just doing my thing!” George yelled.

Andy pointed to his ear and shook his head, pretending he could not hear. He hoped these conditions would prove too difficult to support conversation.

“My thing!” George yelled.

Andy nodded.

“Our branch is closed on Tuesdays! Serious cuts!”

“Sorry to hear that,” Andy said into his cleats. The rain slid down the windshield and windows. Andy's anxious breathing began to fog up the inside of the glass. George
became a wet and indistinct blur, but Andy could still hear him speaking slowly through the window. He was disappointed about a tax referendum in his county, but he still had faith in the democratic process. The information was out there. The people could find it, make informed choices. Then something about either wetlands or weapons. Andy remained silent, hidden in his fortress of condensation. He was not, at this point of the weekend, having a good time, though he knew that good times were probably just for teenagers dancing around a big bonfire in a clearing in the woods with loud music playing from an open hatchback. After a few minutes, the talking stopped and the foggy blur disappeared from Andy's passenger window. Andy had been inconsiderate, he knew. He thought of his wife, what she would say to him. She would say that he had been cruel to George. She would say that George wasn't so bad. She would say he's lonely. But Andy's wife was the person who invariably, at any social gathering, ended up cornered by a gesticulating freak. The eccentrics preyed on her, sensing her weakness, her gentle open face, her listening skills. They had things they wanted to share—their health problems, their pets' health problems, their unpublished fantasy novels, the fires that nearly destroyed their childhood homes, the recent spate of vandalism in their neighborhoods, their long estrangements from their felonious sons. Andy's wife would stand for hours with her back to the artwork, so careful not to touch it, clutching an empty glass of wine, making eye contact, nodding at the lunatic.
And then on the drive home she would brim with misanthropic rage. Why, she would want to know, had Andy not saved her? Could he not see that she was trapped by that woman with her fringed vest tucked into the elastic waist of her skirt? With those huge feather earrings? That woman talking for
over an hour
about chestnut blight? Andy recalled how strange it had been, in the first giddy months of marriage, to introduce her, to consider her, as his wife. And now it would be just as strange to think of her as his ex-wife.

Andy was startled by a loud knock on the driver's-side window. The blur outside the car looked like it might be George. It knocked again with knuckles, rubbed the window with the wet sleeve of its jacket. “Andy?” It was George. “Are you still in there? What are you doing?”

Andy considered this question. What was he doing? Was he doing his thing? Was hiding from librarians his thing?

“Can I come in?” George yelled.

Andy didn't answer. After a brief pause, George opened the back door, and got into the car behind Andy. Andy saw him in the rearview mirror. George was soaked, and dripping onto the cloth seats. He shivered and said, “Almost Indian summer weather here in mid-November,” imitating Frank Gifford's commentary in the seconds before the ball was snapped on Theismann's final play. George's imitation was not bad. Not as good as Gil's, but not bad.

“Anyway,” George said, continuing a conversation he had apparently initiated outside the car, “the Internet
should belong to everyone. We've been too slow in bringing it to rural areas and the inner city. The very notion—”

“Why?” Andy said.

George wiped rainwater from his face. He lifted his eyebrows, perplexed, though not offended, by Andy's undemocratic spirit.

“Why?” Andy said. “It's just online shopping. It's just pornography. It's videos of two unlikely animals becoming friends. Why do the destitute require this? Who cares?”

Andy had meant to shut George up, but he realized his mistake immediately. There was nothing George relished more than the free exchange of ideas. What Andy had intended as a vicious, conversation-slaying remark was instead, he now understood by the look on George's face in the mirror, a generous and provocative strand in the complex braid of their constitutionally protected discourse. Andy could feel George's excitement emanating wetly from the backseat.

“I just read a fascinating study,” George said, with the methodical force of a snowplow.

“George,” Andy said.

“This lead researcher from the University of Illinois devised an ingenious study. What he did was—”

“George, are you married?”

“What?”

“Are you married?”

“Yes, by common law.”

“Well, okay,” Andy said. “I was married, see, and now I'm getting a divorce.”

George made an extended sympathetic noise in the backseat. In the mirror Andy could see George wincing. “Andy, I'm really sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Hey, man,” George said, leaning forward and reaching his hands around the driver's seat. His left wrist got tangled momentarily in the seat belt, but eventually he was able to grip the tops of Andy's arms, and squeeze. Even if Andy had wanted to free himself from George's grip, he wasn't sure he could have. He could feel George's knees in the small of his back. He risked a glance, but George had the crown of his head resting on the back of Andy's seat, and he was no longer visible in the mirror. “Come here, man,” George said.

“I'm here,” Andy whispered.

“Tell me what happened.”

This was a good configuration for Andy. This could work. As long as the windows remained fogged, as long as the rain made that sound on the thin roof of the car, as long as George's face was invisible in the mirror, as long as George gripped the tops of his arms and did not try to rub his shoulders, Andy felt that he could talk.

“One night last February—it was February twenty-third—we had dinner with some friends. There were two other couples there. We were having drinks before dinner. There was one of those uncomfortable lulls in the conversation, so I began to speak, just to end the silence. Another woman began speaking, too, at the same time, but then she laughed and said for me to please go ahead. I
went ahead, George. I think about that now. I kept talking. I said that I had heard an interesting story on NPR. It was about these dinosaurs called oviraptors. The name means ‘egg thief' or something.”

“Yes,” George said slowly. “Egg seizer.”

“The scientist who discovered and named the oviraptor had found its bones on top of a nest of eggs. He surmised that the dinosaur was snatching these eggs, raiding the nest for food. But now scientists are taking another look at these creatures, and they think maybe this male oviraptor was not stealing the eggs, but maybe he was guarding them, being a good dad. Maybe he was taking care of the nest. And all this time, you know, he's been getting a bad rap.

“The other couples nodded and seemed interested. Not interested, maybe, but tolerant, and relieved at least that someone was speaking. Squeeze harder. But my wife was not happy at all. Julie. Her eyes kind of flashed, and she was just grinding cashews in her teeth, just grinding them to dust. She was drunk when we came. I was, too, I guess. She stands up, George. She stands up, puts her empty glass on the mantel, and says to the group that she had
also
heard an interesting story on NPR.”

“Oh, no,” George said softly into the fabric of Andy's seat.

“Yes, that's right. She said it was
fascinating
. It was a follow-up story, she said, about a recent ice storm in the Northeast. And they interviewed a tree expert who said that some of these big old trees—these majestic oaks and
elms and pines—these trees, the expert said, could sometimes have up to fifty thousand pounds of ice in them. Fifty thousand. She kept repeating that number. Fifty thousand. And she kind of pursed her lips the way she does, and she tucked her hair behind her ear, and that was it. We had dinner, we went home and had sex in the bathtub, and the next day she said she thought it would be best if I would leave.”

George groaned into the seat, and Andy could feel it in his chest. George kept a tight grip on the tops of Andy's arms. “That is rough, man,” he said.

Andy nodded. With the windows fogged, he could not see cars or men or hotel.

“But hey, listen, I think you probably know,” George said, “that the problems had been building up for a long, long time before that night in February.”

Andy stared at the dust on his dashboard. How does a car get so dusty? “That is true,” he said. He put his hand on top of the Redskins helmet, which was sitting obediently in the passenger seat. It seemed like a pet, an animate thing, stolid and content and loyal. He wished he were wearing it on his head.

“Andy, I've got some of my homemade stuff in a flask,” George said. “You want some firewater?”

Andy said yes, realizing too late that George would have to release his grip on Andy's upper arms to retrieve his flask. Ungripped, Andy felt suddenly insubstantial, incoherent. He took a big drink from the flask. Whatever it was, was horrible, but he was grateful for it. When he
handed the flask to the backseat, he looked into the mirror and watched George drink. Andy noticed that George's thin gray hair, wet from the rain, was short and spiky on top. It was not pulled back.

“Hey,” Andy said, “did you get your ponytail cut off?”

George nodded while drinking. Then he coughed into the back of his hand. “A couple of months ago, I saw a picture of myself on the library blog,” he said. “It was taken from behind. And the next day I cut that thing off myself. It was time, man.”

PETER TYPICALLY PARKED
in the small lot at the side of the hotel. He had done it once as a mistake years ago, and now he maintained the practice out of his unarticulated sense that continuity was of a higher priority than convenience. A yellow sports car crouched dormant at one end of the nearly empty lot, far from the side entrance. The car was parked directly over a painted line, so as to take two full spots, proving once again to Peter that there are basically two types of people in the world. Though stationary and driverless, the car seemed contemptuous and reckless, with a wide, powerful backside. It seemed to
want
to break laws. It somehow gleamed without sunlight. In much the same way that he worried that his legs would fling his body from observation decks or scenic overlooks, Peter worried now that he would accelerate his Accord into the lean flank
of the yellow sports car. He parked on the opposite side of the lot, pulling the emergency brake.

Since Peter used a side entrance, the men who had entered the lobby—even Robert in his stuffed chair—did not notice him. The woman at the front desk looked up and smiled at Peter as he passed, but he did not acknowledge her. He walked to the dining area, where he filled a cup with water at the juice dispenser. Upon opening the microwave he was momentarily stunned by the miasma of irradiated popcorn. He blinked his eyes against the vapors, steadied his legs. The interior of the microwave, like the interiors of all public microwaves, resembled the scene of a double homicide. He put the cup inside, closed the door, and programmed the oven to heat the water on high for one minute and fifty-six seconds. The start button was concave with history, like the stone steps of an ancient cathedral. The microwave rattled and popped. A dim interior bulb cast a faint yellow glow on the revolving cup and the spattered walls. A sign on top of the microwave, framed like the photograph of a family pet, asked that microwave users please demonstrate a respectful attitude toward fellow users. The clip art image on the sign, inexplicably, was of a guitar. Peter paced as the green digital numbers descended toward zero. He touched the new mouthguard in his pocket. On his phone he checked the weather, sent a text, renewed a prescription. He stood on his left leg, flexing his right knee. He had reached an age when a sore knee might mean either that the knee was sore, or that the knee was shot. He frequently had occasion
to consider the phrase
bone on bone
. The microwave oven rattled along like some World's Fair exhibit. Could this really be, in our age, the fastest method for heating things up? Peter looked around, but there was nobody else in the dining area. A long banner above the continental buffet station welcomed Prestige Vista Solutions. On television, heavy wind pushed a car across a tennis court, eliciting nervous laughter and censored profanity from the amateur videographer. Peter ran his hand through his hair, which he had allowed to grow long in anticipation of a Saturday afternoon haircut from Carl. He did not particularly like Carl's haircuts, but he got one every year, and he worried that he would hurt Carl's feelings if he did not sign up. Peter stopped the microwave with two seconds remaining, and removed the hot cup of water. Then, following directions he knew very well, he dropped the new mouthguard into the slow boil. It floated there like a translucent semi-sessile annelid, the kind of tubular aquatic worm that is capable of regeneration. He left the guard in the water for slightly longer than directed, and instead of rinsing it quickly in cold water, as the instructions exhorted in bold font, he placed it directly into his mouth. He bit down hard, sucked vigorously to remove the air and water. He looked around, but there was nobody else in the dining area. The plastic was soft, and it tasted like synthetic butter. With his finger Peter pressed the scalding plastic into his gums; with his tongue he pushed the guard into the back of his top and bottom teeth. He sculpted the guard, made it his own. It was now unique. After a minute,
which he counted more or less accurately in his head, he extracted the mouthguard and rinsed it in cold water from the juice dispenser. He put the mouthguard back into his mouth, and looked around. If the fit was not good, he could boil the mouthguard again. The fit was good, but he decided to boil the mouthguard again.