Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter (21 page)

Hu turned out to be a pretty good athlete. When I turned the corner and dashed past a customer through the sliding doors, I saw him trucking for the bathroom with his head down and arms crossed over his odd-mannered gut that never moved, no matter the activity, the side effect of a mood-stabilizing drug that obviously didn’t work. He bowled over a contractor and a housewife, losing his glasses on his path toward a stocking clerk whom he startled into crumbling against a shelf. I was close to cutting him off and might’ve saved the day by dive tackling him, but I didn’t, thinking I’d only end up getting sued by the Charity House. He came to a slamming halt at the bathroom door, then locked himself inside.

It wasn’t long before Hu embarked on his mission of enraged splat terings. Mr. Jaffe arrived on the scene at the sounds of the paper towel dispenser being torn from the wall and then stomped. “It’s okay!” he kept yelling, knocking and pleading. “We’ve got your glasses! Good as new! Come on out, Hu!”

One of the warehouse workers helped the housewife to her feet. The Jackie Chan impersonator shook his head at all the other customers, pretending to be professionally disappointed as a way of holding back his laughter. The ruckus died down after about fifteen minutes, even if the cursing lasted much longer. When it became clear that Hu wouldn’t come out on his own, Mr. Jaffe called a locksmith. I’ll never forget the moment when the door finally swung open, the sight of Hu plopped down Indian style on a shit-streaked floor, looking like he’d been brooding in his self-made prison for thirty years. When he cried his whole body trembled. Some of the shit fell from his cheeks and neck.

I asked Mr. Jaffe for Hu’s glasses, then walked into the bathroom and crouched down to his level. “It’s not your fault,” I told him, placing the glasses on his face. “I’m sorry.” Hu didn’t look up. He threw the glasses against the wall and yelled, “Fuck you, mister!”

There was nothing left to say. I walked out the front entrance, filled with the sort of rage that permitted me to stroll off the premises just as easily as if I’d stopped in for a lightbulb and couldn’t find the one I needed. But this is not the end of the story. Consider everything I’ve just relayed as backstory for the incident I initially set out to share, which is this:

While heading across the golf course on my way home I tried to put myself in Hu’s shoes. I considered what it would feel like being rejected from stepping onto a city bus. I considered what it would feel like to walk along Meredith Avenue covered in shit. I considered what it would feel like to face the laughter and repulsion of the other residents at the Charity House. And now I arrive at the moment when, in the midst of these thoughts, a lanky member of a Sigma Pi foursome decided to try his luck hitting me with his tee shot. While I’ll never really know the truth, to this day I feel certain there was a bet involved in this decision. Either way, his ball bounced about five feet in front of me, taking a long hop and another short one before skittering to rest in the shallow rough. In truth I didn’t know whether his group had already arrived at the tee box when I started across the fairway, but this detail didn’t seem to matter. I picked up his ball and threw it into the woods, as casually as if I’d found a perfect rock to skip across the surf. Then I marched up the center of the fairway looking happily anxious for the brawl that one might have imagined I’d made a reservation for at the pro shop earlier that week. The golfers readied themselves by adjusting their visors, flicking their cigarettes, and spitting. One of them went as far as to tug his sleeves up over his shoulders. These fierce gestures fell somewhat slack as I drew nearer, likely in response to my disregard for their Big Bertha drivers, and the Cheshire cat grin that seemed imposed upon me by a ghostly counterpart with an ironic sense of the moral edge. “We didn’t see you!” the lanky one shouted, cocking his club like a baseball bat. “Don’t make me do it!”

Then he hesitated and his swing arrived too late. The head of the club didn’t even hit me and I hardly noticed the shaft striking me in the ribs. The club rattled onto the cart path as I hooked his long pinkish arm that he’d practically handed to me. I locked his head under my right armpit and lifted him as high as I could, bending my knees and arching my back in the manner of a textbook five-point throw over my right shoulder. After traveling an upside-down arc, my opponent was slammed flat on his back onto the cart path pavement. Soon a bright red carnation blossomed on his cheek. He rolled onto his side and covered his face, sucking noisily for the wind knocked from his chest. His fellow threesome stared in disarmed disbelief as the hair on one side of his head darkened with blood. The bravest of them, baby-faced and mustard-stained, edged toward his friend with his hands up in the air, apparently proclaiming himself a pacifistic medical intermediary. I shoved my quivering hands into my pockets and stepped back, feeling suddenly engulfed in a clouded kiln. The last thing I remember was coughing in some weird sick way, and the shouts at my back as I dashed for the woods.

Twenty-five

If you’ve ever been a wrestler, or ever loved one, you will probably be familiar with a phenomenon referred to as “muscle memory.” As Coach Grady would likely reason it, in the moment of my opponent’s clumsy attack my muscles simply reacted as they’d been trained to react over the course of a few hundred freestyle practices when I’d been pressed to exploit the vulnerability of overemotional opponents who in the final minute of a losing match would often launch forward in frantic, spread-winged anger. Though I was never honestly convinced of this reasoning, I pretended to be convinced of it for the following afternoons of jobless seclusion, which were largely dedicated to bong hits and soap operas in Zach’s bachelorized bedroom during his day shift up at Gordo’s. (I have no idea what strain of cannabis Zach was smoking at the time, but it was potent and forcibly reminding of the antidrug counselor back in Davenport who’d warned us of the twelve-year-old marijuana addict whose testosterone turned to estrogen, causing his testicles to shrink and his mammary glands to swell until he’d grown a pair of little boy breasts.) More than once I discovered, halfway through one convoluted drama or another, that all the actors were speaking Spanish. I constantly peered through the basement windows for signs of Sigma Pi posses on patrol. Even more upsetting than my paranoia was the moment I came to the understanding—during a double feature of softly upsetting commercials for adult diapers and laser hair replacement—that a dear, intangible part of me had just broken away, setting sail for nonviolent adventures among moralistic peoples.

But I already decided to avoid the specifics of those first maddening weeks of grief, and have now clearly regressed. I scurry ahead to events more apropos to my relationship with the Schell family, beginning with my two unplanned encounters with Mr. Schell. The first of these occurred at the Seventy-third Street YMCA, which I began attending in an effort to restore a modicum of emotional and cognitive stability. (Colin Franzen, who worked at the front desk, offered me a membership discount usually reserved for stroke and car wreck victims in rehabilitation.) By then I’d more or less regained my appetite and was benching as much weight as ever, a feat no doubt motivated by the conceit that Katie Schell was my invisible spotter, urging me on for additional repetitions that in reality put me at risk of having to crawl out from under a two-hundred-twenty-pound bar pinning me to the bench. But the first hour or two after exercising were my most optimistic of the week, and the Saturday morning I encountered Mr. Schell was no exception.

That day I arrived to a shower room that was empty aside from the one old guy who was always there scalding himself in a cloud of steam. I chose a showerhead at the far end of the row and began lathering myself, taking pride in the noticeable swell returned to my shoulders and chest, the cable cord veins in my forearms. A minute later Mr. Schell showed up still dripping in a red Speedo and matching swimming cap. He looked so different from every other time I’d seen him that it took me a few seconds to recognize him. At that point I quickly turned into the spray so that it masked my face, hoping he hadn’t seen me glance over as he walked in. I washed my hair, applying liberal amounts of shampoo in order to conceal my ebullient identity and occasional sidewise, stinging-eyed surveillance. I couldn’t help wondering why he was slumming it at the YMCA when almost all of his neighbors attended the Timberline Club, where for three hundred dollars per month you could work out on plush aqua blue carpet and drink all the mineral water you could handle. He hung his swimsuit and cap neatly over the shower bar, then squeezed soap over his hand scrubber that fit like a glove. Despite his chicken legs and frowny-faced ass covered with stretch marks, I couldn’t help but notice the surprising definition of Mr. Schell’s upper back and shoulder muscles, which forced me to recall Katie’s assertion that once upon a time he’d competed as a lightweight boxer.

After what seemed an hour considering how to take the first brave step toward reconciliation, I concluded that the shower room at the YMCA was neither the time nor place for a conversation about the exact truth of what happened out at Saylorville Lake. Certain that Mr. Schell had yet to recognize me, I took my opportunity to escape as soon as he went for the shampoo lever and started washing his hair. But he turned around at the exact moment of my flight, just as my manhood began bobbing side to side like a resolute pup on a happy sidewalk strut. His eyebrows furrowed and his shoulders lifted up. With his hair slicked back he appeared an eagle who’d caught in its radar a little mouse scurrying out from a hole hundreds of feet below. This reaction almost immediately gave way to an expression of doubt and depression, but by then I was already puffing my chest out and roughly scratching a few places that didn’t itch. Mr. Schell peered into my eyes with such a pained and polite hesitation that I felt like a customer whose business he simply couldn’t risk his respectability by accepting. I swaggered into the locker area, feeling hotheaded, spiteful, etc. I took my time drying off to compile a list of similar adjectives I’d hardly have used to describe myself a few months before. Sitting on a wooden bench with my face in my hands, I summoned all the apologies and humble condolences I intended to offer Mr. Schell as soon as he entered the locker area. But I suspected my chance had passed and couldn’t be recovered, that Mr. Schell had no intention of quitting his shower until he was certain I’d already left.

Twenty-six

Our second encounter occurred late one night after I’d been driving the same circles around town that I used to drive with Emily, only instead of deejaying and faking choking fits for the entertainment of our neighboring drivers, now I was poring over minor moral compromises such as the slow killing of my first buck after I’d tagged him in the hind, wobbling and almost felling him before his rack twisted and his hind legs kicked and he dashed away, bouncing off a tree trunk before switching directions and blending into the woods and becoming forever lost. After wasting over a quarter tank of gas I ended up cereal shopping at Hy-Vee, where I ran into former student council member Kip Nevins. Based on our conversation, apparently he thought he’d been voted into a lifetime position related to psychological guidance. “You should really
be
with people,” he kept saying, after inviting me to join a group of classmates heading to a free concert of a band whose name he couldn’t remember. On the drive home I noticed Mr. Schell’s Beemer parked next to a cluster of lesser vehicles in a run-down strip mall off Hickman Road. I slammed on the brakes and made a two-hundred-seventy-degree turn, not knowing why I was doing it, but parking at the far end of the lot, which by night held an air of kinky secrecy that I blamed on the red band of neon along its wooden awning, and the dubiously unmarked offices smattered among Irish sweater, classic bicycle, and other such specialty shops on the first level. The Down Under Bar was located on the second level, up a flight of splintered stairs, and was the only establishment in the strip mall still open.

I sat for a while with the headlights dimmed, listening to the soft drone of AM radio while asking myself if the blame Mr. Schell had assigned me was inordinate, whether it represented a just response to my negligence, or rather an irrational parental instinct for scape goatism. I imagined the conversations that might arise if I were able to join him for a few stiff drinks. While I had no intention of positioning myself as Mr. Schell’s rival, after our shower room run-in I sensed I’d been drawn into an unspoken debate where all our arguments were waged by telepathic intuition. (I’d already transferred my YMCA membership to the Eleventh Street branch, feeling I’d lost the opening battle and ought to nobly concede the west side of the city.) But I harbored little bitterness for him and could hardly breathe when imagining the pain he was suffering living in a house suddenly void of the gonzo comedy of Katie Schell, with whom he spoke a father-daughter idiom that no one else understood. Since her diagnosis he’d done everything in his power to comfort her—often neglecting his business to remain at her side during her weeklong visits to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota—and I had no doubt he’d lost more in Katie’s death than any of us.

At some point during my musings a county cab pulled into the lot and parked by the stairway leading to the second level. Mr. Schell stepped outside, trailing a shorter man who was clearly drunk, clinging to the railing on his way downstairs. Both men were wearing business suits, though only the second man’s tie was still tight, pinching his neck and exacerbating the fact of his big bulbous head. Given that Mr. Schell wasn’t much of a drinker (he drank nonalcoholic beer well before it was in vogue, if that day ever came), I guessed he’d gotten stuck in a dinner meeting with a client who’d given Schell’s Shirtworks enough business that he wasn’t embarrassed getting plastered on a weeknight. Mr. Schell opened the taxi door. His associate hardly noticed and kept chattering on, every once in a while slapping Mr. Schell’s shoulder in a way that made me think he had no clue that this man had just lost his younger daughter and was likely to collapse of sorrow the moment of their parting. Even I was relieved when the cab finally pulled onto Hickman and headed east. Mr. Schell rubbed his temples as he ambled across the parking lot to his car. He drove off in the opposite direction of the cab. I decided to follow him.