Wichita (9781609458904) (4 page)

“Nah, I'm pretty much used to it,” Cody says. He's an assistant to a beekeeper, he explains. Last Lewis heard Cody was learning to install security cameras. What Cody imagined when he took this new job was peaceful stoned days spent sliding trays of honey out of those cool white boxes. But Cody's boss is getting most of his work from banks that have foreclosed on homes, which, after standing empty, sometimes become infested by bees. And these bees get pretty damn pissed-off when you evict 'em. Hence all the stings.

Then, as if remembering, Cody looks up and announces, “Yo, I'm gonna hop a freight up to work the sugar beet harvest in August!”

“South Dakotee?” Butch asks.

“Yep,” Cody says, nodding eagerly. “Or Minnesota.”

“Minneso
tee
,” Seth says.

“People still ride freight trains?” Lewis asks. He actually knows they do; he's heard Seth talk about it. He's read about it. The question just popped out.

“Hell, yeah!” Cody says, turning to him. “Dude, you should come with me! You can make ten g's in, like, a matter of
weeks
!”

Lewis imagines a lush summer landscape clattering past the open doorway of a boxcar. Maybe he will hop a freight train with Cody, work the sugar-beet harvest. But his attention is drawn back to Butch, who is staring at Lewis in disgusted amazement.

“Citizen,” Butch mutters, shaking his head with contempt.

“Pardon me?” Lewis says.

“Now, fellas!” Seth says and leans across the table with his arms spread as if to keep Lewis and Butch separated.

“Pardon you?” Butch says. He makes a regal gesture of dismissal with a puffy, reddish hand. “OK, you're pardoned!”

“Fellas!” Seth says again, unable to keep the excitement out of his voice. “Let's keep this civilized!”

“So Cody,” Harry begins, looking a little pale.

“I said you're a
citizen
,” Butch tells Lewis, with the slight shrug of someone stating a value-neutral fact.

“So what are you?” Lewis asks and hears Cody suck in a breath.

“Not that,” says Butch, raising his chin. “I'm not at liberty to
say
what
I
am.”

“Oh, I see,” Lewis says. “Top secret.” But regrets it as Butch's face flushes darkly.

“I just can't
decide
,” Seth says. “I mean, I
love
the way it feels in my hand—it's
so sexy
—but they say the
line
drops a lot. What do you think, Butch? iPhone?”

Butch sits staring murderously at Lewis. Now Abby appears with a tray of hors d'oeuvres. “Anyone like to try one of these mushroom things?” she asks. She holds the tray over the table and the current between Lewis and Butch is broken. “They're really good.”

Harry takes a mushroom puff. “Thanks, Abby.”

“Butch, have a damn shroom, already!” Seth says, pushing the tray toward Butch.

Butch shakes his head, the matted gray ponytails swinging. “I'm gonna head out,” he says, rising from his chair suddenly enough to make Lewis flinch, he hopes not too obviously. Looking buffeted by the violence in the air, sensitive Stacy pushes a switch on the arm of her wheelchair and reverses away from the table to clear a path for Butch's exit.

“I'll give you a lift, Butch,” Harry offers cheerfully. Lewis gets up from his chair to let Seth and Harry out, conscious of rising to his full height and peering down at Butch, who looks more stooped and brittle than menacing now that he's on his feet. Avoiding Lewis's eyes, he walks deliberately out of the kitchen wearing a haughty expression, followed by Harry and Seth, who shakes his head at Lewis as if to say, “I can't bring you anywhere!”

“Thanks, Mrs. Seth!” Butch calls from the garage, his froggy voice echoing.

“Any time, Butch!” Abby calls back. She closes the door and turns with a wide-eyed, perplexed expression. “What was
that
all about?” But the front door bell rings and she goes to answer it before anyone can reply.

“Do you know that guy?” Lewis asks Cody. Cody shakes his head decisively, defensively, as if Lewis might hold him to account. “
I
don't know him! He must be a traveler-hobo dude.” He opens the door and peers out into the garage as if worried there might be more from Butch then closes it and returns to Lewis's side. “They don't consider themselves US citizens,” he whispers. “Have their own code and shit.”

Seth comes in from the garage as Abby returns from the living room, where women's laughter and festive voices can now be heard.

“So what was that all about with Butch?” Abby asks, looking at Seth then Lewis as she hoists a tray of hors d'oeuvres.

“Butch called Lewis a ‘citizen' and Lewis, like,
lost it
!” Seth says in faux dismay. “I think he's ashamed to be
American
or something, Mom!”

Abby goes out with the tray without dignifying this with a reply; Seth lets out a triumphant cackle and thumps Lewis dismissively on the chest and Lewis seizes his hand, catching him off guard, and bends it downward at the wrist in a drop-the-weapon move he learned from Seth himself. Bigger and stronger, Lewis has always enjoyed a casually dominant physical relation to Seth, though Seth played football and the rest too, before spurning it all in favor of skateboarding. But while Lewis has been essentially ignoring his body for the past five or six years, doing the minimum to keep it healthy and functioning, Seth has devoted himself to mixed martial arts: his torso is cut and hard, his neck and upper shoulders thickened as if for head-butting or withstanding a battering. He's also picked up a new attitude, whether on the streets and in jail or just in the course of training, a dangerous glint in his eye.

So Lewis is taking care to inflict no more than a playful, light pain, just enough to hold Seth in check for a moment, repay him in part for the presence of Butch and that riff about the extra year it took Lewis to graduate, which stung more than Lewis let himself feel when he sat listening to it with a tolerant smile. In his junior year he decided that if he were actually going to read all the pages of Kant and Hegel and Žižek being assigned, he would have to take a lighter load. Virgil and Gerty, even Victoria, tried to dissuade him but he went ahead with it: he would show them how to be authentic; a truly serious student read every single word assigned. Well, no, he didn't; it wasn't possible, for one thing. And even with the lighter load, Lewis read about the same percentage as always. Adding the extra year, it seems to him now, simply lengthened his stay and made him vulnerable to being called slow, irresolute. It was another stick on the fire burning down Victoria's belief in him. As for being twenty-three, he just turned. He's surprised Seth knew or noticed; he can't remember the last time Seth acknowledged his or anybody else's birthday. But Seth notices and notes more than he lets on.

Set has managed to flex impressively backwards and sideways far enough to reach inside an open cutlery drawer with his free hand. He's grinning, Lewis is relieved to see; everything is still in jest. He's no doubt detecting having succeeded in annoying Lewis enough to cut through Lewis's galling aloofness: this is already a victory.

Stacy, Lewis sees, has nestled her wheelchair into the far rear of the breakfast nook and is reading a paperback as if adept at tuning out such chaos. The frilly pink leather knapsack hanging from the handlebars of the wheelchair always has books in it—
The Chronicles of Narnia
, Tolkien, Harry Potter. She reads them over and over. Cody stands beaming his approval at the tussle from close by but ready to flee if it surges his way.

Lewis increases the pressure on Seth's wrist then abruptly lets go and pulls Cody over to use as a shield against the butter-knife attack Seth is mounting. The dogs are barking shrilly around their legs. Cody screams.

And in comes Donald bearing grocery bags in each hand and stops in his tracks. He's a large, lumbering guy in his fifties, mop of dark straight hair speckled with gray, thick glasses, thick moustache like a gay clone from the seventies. In New York he would be considered fat, in Wichita he's “big.” He's wearing pale khakis and a white T-shirt and a pair of enormous cross-trainers that have enough rubber to shoe a village in the tropics.

“Put that knife away, please,” he tells Seth, blinking nervously. Lewis has no idea what's already gone down between these two: Donald may have good cause to be nervous. Lewis has meanwhile been moving crabwise away to dissociate himself from the scene.

“Of course!” Seth says and pretends to stab Cody in the gut and Cody obliges by folding forward and screaming again.

“Seth,
put it away
,” Donald says through clenched teeth.

Seth pouts and flips the knife back in the drawer with a clatter. “It's a
butter
knife, Don buddy, not a
shank
.”

Donald sighs forbearingly and sets the grocery bags on the counter.

“Lewis!” he says now, coming forward to shake his hand as if singling out a fellow rational adult among the tattooed savages. And unwittingly echoing Seth's burlesque of the same gesture in the driveway. “Welcome.”

“Thanks,” Lewis murmurs, though “welcome” from Donald's lips is worrisome, not to mention a little presumptuous. While Donald unpacks the groceries (more supplies for Abby's cocktail party, Lewis notes, not day-to-day basics that would suggest permanent residency) he and Lewis make small talk about Donald's visit to New York while Seth grumbles to Cody about how Donald must have some undiagnosed
vision
problem if the man can't distinguish a
butter
knife from a
shank
.

Abby comes in for more finger food and wine, gives Donald a distracted, oblivious kiss, and goes back out. Hands on hips now, Donald surveys the kitchen and sets about tidying up with a stoic mien, shaking the dregs from a Foster's can into the sink and dropping the can into a blue recycle bin with a clank.

“Donald,
buddy
,” Seth says languidly, watching from a chair at the breakfast nook table now, the soles of his bare feet up and exposed in a way that makes Lewis think of how the posture is deemed an insult in certain Middle Eastern cultures, “you don't have to do that!” Meanwhile winking at Lewis to say: it's actually really nice to have a man servant, you'll see. He pushes with a finger a beer-filmed glass an inch or two closer to the edge of the table to make it easier for Donald to pick up.

“It's so hard to
know
what happened in past lives,” Seth says to Lewis quasi-speculatively, “isn't it? Why certain people have certain relations to others in
this
life. You have your teachers and your students, then you have the folks who come in after class to empty the trash and whatnot. Why?”

While Cody gives straightforward consideration to this chestnut, Lewis frowns at Seth over Donald's shoulder, annoyed to be made a party to mockery of a man he barely knows. Though Donald may be too dim or unaware to be getting Seth's drift.

“The whole question of
hierarchy
is what I'm getting at,” Seth says and too tired to head this off, Lewis is preparing to fly the coop when Abby reappears looking flushed and pleased. “They're
loving
the hydro-stick!
Tons
of enrollment!”

Seth is on his feet. “I need to get a
look
at these ladies.”

“Put a shirt on first,” Abby tells him and he rolls his eyes but snatches a sleeveless black T-shirt from the back of his chair and slips it on as he lopes off toward the living room.

“Get my note?” Donald asks, embracing Abby from behind, his enormous head slotted over her shoulder by the jaw, fleshy fingers interlaced at her waist. If there were a zoological sign for Abby's type it would be the Bear.

“Note,” she echoes, preoccupied with arranging another tray of hors d'oeuvres. “Oh, yes! Thank you for that.”

“I meant every word of it,” Donald says. Really? Lewis thinks snarkily. Did he mean the “the's” and the “and's”? Now
that's
true love.

Seth is back from recon. “Yo, you should bust out those stripper poles!” he tells Abby. She must have kept the L'il Vixen “erotic supports” she invested in two years ago, without much success, or Lewis would have heard about it.

Donald pauses in his loading of the dishwasher. “Stripper poles?” He's amused, titillated.

“Trust me,” Seth says knowingly, “them ladies are lubed up and ready to
roll
!”

“You think?” Abby says.

“And what
I
will do,
Donald
,” Seth says, pulling out his cellphone, “as a way to contribute to the ‘household economy,' is place a call to a couple of
professionals
I happen to have in my personal network of
professional contacts
. Said professionals who will be happy to give Mom's friends
a demonstration
.”

Abby stares at Seth abstractly, considering the idea.

“Operators are standing by!” Seth says in a singsong voice, waggling his cell.

“Go for it,” she says. Seth grins and, opening the sliding glass door with his elbow, slips outside while scrolling through numbers on his cell.

While Abby and Donald pour more wine for the Racquet Club ladies, Lewis watches Seth talking on his cell, gesture expansively with his free hand in which he's holding an unlit cigarette. Does he have a disease like malaria that goes dormant then flares up under certain conditions? Or is this another pathology with a shelf life of a decade or two? The meds prescribed by Harry—lithium mostly—do even out Seth's moods, which is apparently as good a proof of bipolar disorder as there is: lithium works. Not that anyone understands how or why. That's when Seth takes his lithium. Sometimes he refuses, or lies about it.