Reed Coleman - They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee

“What am I doing, Zak?”

“Why do you slow down all the time and look at your face in the store windows?”

He was exactly right. I did stop and stare, but I had never given much thought to the reasons why.

“I don’t know,” I recall saying. “I guess I slow down to let the people pass. I don’t think I like it when people get too close behind me.”

He looked at his hand in mine and then up at me. “It’s okay for me to be close, Uncle Dylan?”

“You? Always, kiddo. Always.”

Sure, it was cute, but that’s not why it had stuck with me all these years. On that day I realized Zak had the power to make me look at myself in ways and at times I would have never thought to look. He was like a part of me that could step outside myself and hold a mirror up to the dark places I avoided. And now he was doing it again, holding up the dark mirror.

“You expected me to come,” I spoke to Zak, “didn’t you?”

“Hoped, Uncle Dylan, not expected.”

“But you had my favorite beer in the fridge.”

“My favorite, too.” He hesitated, then asked: “Are you still mad at me?”

“I’m still mad at everyone, from your father to my agent, from Grandpa to MacClough. I was born mad, you know that. You weren’t, Zak. It’s one of the really good parts about the differences between us.”

“I get mad, really mad.”

“There’s a big difference between getting and being,” I said, “a big fucking difference.”

“I guess.”

“Go upstairs and get us a couple of our favorite beers. When you come back, I think there’s some stuff we need to explain to each other.”

He went first. He told me about Kira and their brief affair and how they agreed they were better off as friends. Zak’s recap of his first meeting with Valencia Jones was right in line with what she had said. Zak was self-aware. He knew he was a sucker for sadness and Valencia Jones had sadness to spare. And though Riversborough College was allegedly a bastion not only of liberal arts but of liberal thinking, Valencia Jones was almost an immediate outcast. She was black, unspectacular to look at, and as soon as word of her parentage spread through the campus, she was designated a persona non grata.

That was all my nephew needed to know. Zak didn’t fall in love with Valencia Jones so much as adopt her cause. Oh, they liked each other well enough, fought through the awkwardness of sexual inexperience together, and went to the movies a lot. Zak was her defender, her confidant. Having met her, I got the feeling she rather needed the confidant more than the defender. Their relationship began to unravel when many relationships do; they were getting bored. You can only play sir knight and damsel in distress for just so long before it gets a wee bit tedious. It was Zak’s idea for them to move in together. Stepping back and letting go was not something the Kleins-all the Kleins-did with any ease. Valencia Jones had balked at first, but gave into the idea out of a sense of obligation. Even Zak could see how he had set them up for a big fall.

Just before the Spring break, Valencia Jones begged out of the arrangement. Although he fought it, in true Klein tradition, Zak agreed to the split.

“It was my fault, Uncle Dylan.”

“It’s been my experience that it takes two to make or break a relationship.”

“But that’s not what I mean,” he barked. “I was the reason she got arrested. I arranged for her to go to Cyclone Ridge.”

I choked on that. “I don’t understand.”

“I was feeling shitty for the way things had gone with us living together. Val really needed to get away from me. I knew that. She was going to go down to Daytona with the rest of the college-aged world, but I talked her into finally trying skiing. She always said she wanted to try it and I had promised to take her sometime. We just never got around to doing it. So I called up there and made a reservation for her. The students at the school get a special discount. You can check, I even paid for it with my dad’s credit card.”

“Funny how your dad managed to forget to tell me this. Funny how he forgets to mention a lot of things.”

“It’s the way he controls people,” Zak said.

“Tell me about it. He was my big brother a long time before he was your father. So, you feel guilty because you arranged for Valencia Jones’ ski weekend. It’s wrongheaded thinking, Zak. How could you have known what would happen? It’s not like a drug bust was part of the discount package.”

“That’s cold comfort coming from you and pretty inconsistent. I’m either responsible or not responsible for my inability to foresee future consequences, but not both.”

“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Zak. But you’re talking tennis rackets and stickball bats here,” I chided. “When you made Valencia’s ski reservations, it was an innocent gesture. It would have been unreasonable to suspect anything more ominous than a broken leg to come of it. But there was nothing innocent in your dropping out of circulation. You intended for things to happen, you hoped for it. That’s manipulation. It’s the difference between the sun and a hydrogen bomb. Some chain reactions are natural and beyond our control, some are purposeful and man-made.”

Zak was stunned, absolutely silent, pained. Almost imperceptibly at first, his bottom lip quivered. Large tears poured over his cheeks. He did not bother to wipe them away. I think he literally wanted them to stain his face, to brand him a fool. But he did remain silent.

“I need to be alone right now, Uncle Dylan,” he finally spoke and let himself out of the shelter.

The symbolism of his exit was not lost on me. Sometimes the cost of our life lessons comes at our own expense. Sometimes other people have to pay. When they pay with their lives, reimbursement becomes problematical.

I didn’t have the strength in me not to be happy to see John Francis MacClough. At that moment, I would have forgiven him more than murder. For John had always been magic for me. Though I couldn’t swim a stroke, I felt as if I was never in above my head with him about. I guess it was a silly attitude for a man of forty years to have. I realize the irrationality of it, but when he stuck his head through the shelter hatch, I felt as if I would be saved. Alas, my euphoria at the sight of him was short-lived, as his first words to me were: “You’re fucked, Klein.”

Even that could not ruin my mood entirely. MacClough had been a sort of ploughman’s guardian angel, the adopted older brother who could fulfill the promises my blood brothers could not. I had, in some unarticulated way, come to think of Johnny as the brother without the feet of clay. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d been wrong.

“Thanks, you shanty Irish prick,” I shouted, standing up to hug him. “I’m so fucked, I’m even happy to see your ugly puss.”

But when he stepped back from my embrace, his face was blank. Not cold, exactly, just blank. “You’re happy even though you think I’m a murderer?”

“The rest of the world thinks I’m one. I guess I got religion all of a sudden. Did the news reach home yet?”

“Not before I left, but I’d say the picture from your investigator’s license is probably hitting the airwaves all over North America about now. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it wasn’t you that whacked the whore. Who did it?”

“She wasn’t a whore, MacClough. She was my fiancee.”

“Maybe we better back up.”

I agreed. “Maybe we better.”

Johnny sat down on the lower cot and listened carefully to what I had to say. He showed emotion only once, wincing at my description of Kira’s body-inert, nude, battered-hanging off the bed. It wasn’t the description of her body per se that pained him. I knew that. As a beat cop he’d seen human remains in all manner of horrific states. He used to say he’d found bodies that would make Jack the Ripper’s butcher puke. It was the loss at the chance for love that hurt him. Having let the one true love in his life slip through his fingers decades ago, he could not abide the loss of love. Sometimes, I thought, it was MacClough, not me, who possessed the soul of a writer. As an Irishman, he was born with it.