Antrim, Donald - Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World

We’d just finished dinner. It was a weeknight. It seemed tiresome to point out the fact that blasphemy implies faith. At any rate, my wife’s gift, in its miniature custom box lined in indigo velvet and lidded in coarse plasticine material resembling a horseshoe crab’s exoskeleton, came as a surprise. She said, “You don’t have to be sarcastic, Pete. It’s just a little present. That’s all it is.”

“Thank you, hon.”

“It’s black coral.”

“Really?”

“It’ll protect you.”

I replaced it in its case, then cleared the dinner dishes, making sure to empty the fish bones into the disposal, where Meredith couldn’t get at them in order to self-induce another of her ichthyomorphic trances.

But back to the Kunkel business. I can’t get it out of my mind. I keep seeing Jim’s face, lit red by taillights, in the long moments before the lines snapped taut, while Bill Nixon tried and retried to start his fume-spewing, out-of-tune Celica. It was all so profoundly uncomfortable; there was nothing to do but toe the grass and stare up at the stars in the sky, and listen to that revving and choking, and, of course, to Jim Kunkel, trussed, bound, spread out and spread-eagle on his belly, weeping. Heavy nylon test, the kind sport fishermen around here use to haul in tarpon, radiated from Jim’s wrists and ankles, ran across grass and Jim’s beautiful Japanese rock garden to the back bumpers of cars poised to travel different directions. I wanted to tell Jim it would be over quickly, that it wouldn’t hurt. In fact I suspected otherwise. I was particularly concerned over the use of fishing line for a heavy-stress operation like this. Leaders might hold, or snap, in any of a wide range of infuriating combinations. Success depended on a clean, even pull, with no lurching — just like hauling aboard a big fish.

After a while it became clear that Nixon’s engine was flooding; and, as well, the battery was at risk, grinding down, so Jerry Henderson wisely suggested, “Bill, give it a rest.” The other guys turned off their motors too. It was agreed to wait five minutes, then try again. By the shrubs, in the driveway, at road’s edge, men huddled: Jerry and Bill, Dick Morton, Abraham de Leon, Tom Thompson, Terry Heinemann, Robert Isaac. Did they hear Jim’s sobbing? It occurred to me to go to Jim and rest my hand on his shoulder, to hold him or wipe his forehead, possibly scratch an itch if he felt one. That seemed right. Yes. And to apologize: for the sentence, for the delay in carrying it out, for whatever.

“Pete,” Jim whispered, as if prescient.

“Jim?” I glanced around at the other men. Had they heard Jim call my name? Would talking to the condemned man affect my status among them? But no. No one seemed to notice me edging discreetly toward the ex-mayor. No one seemed to see my body haloed in dim light spilling yellowly from Jim’s bug-deterrent porch bulb.

“An angel, I’m in heaven,” Jim said.

“It’s me, Jim. Pete.” I came close to him. I could’ve reached down and touched him.

“My friend,” he said, shaking his outstretched hands to indicate the lines knotted there. “They’re cutting me.”

What use describing the necessity of secure bonds, the mechanics of tugging as opposed to jerking? “Sorry,” I told him. I noticed a growing crowd murmuring beyond the lawn perimeter. Spectators. Jim said, “You know, Pete, I was on the hiring committee that reviewed your application to teach third grade. How long ago was that?”

“Years.”

“Ours was a mayor’s office screening procedure, mind you, no actual decision authority. Purely advisory. We went over your résumé very carefully. Very carefully. What do you think we advised?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you suppose the mayor’s office told the school board about young Pete Robinson?”

“I don’t know, Jim.”

“Guess.” His neck muscles visibly strained, his head craned upward; and his hands still lightly waved — the impression was of some neurologic episode. He complained, “You’re not a lot of fun, are you? Won’t even guess.”

I figured he was probably in shock. But he spoke again, saying, “You got the job, right? Think about it.” So I did, I thought about it. And realized, or thought I realized, thinking about it, what this was all about, why we were out here doing what we were doing, why Jim’s death had to happen. Jim was no ordinary citizen. He’d once been mayor. He’d held influence over my life, over all our lives.

Now he would suffer a death consequent of dire actions, appropriate to high station: an old leader turned rogue, sundered by the people.

I knelt down close to Jim’s liver-spotted head and whispered to him, “You knew this would happen, didn’t you, old man? You did it for us. Sacrificing those families at the Botanical Garden. You knew your blood would be glue to hold this community together.”

“You’re crazy,” he sputtered as, from another part of the lawn, Jerry Henderson’s voice announced, “Gentlemen, it is time.” Car doors slammed. Tears blended with saliva at the corners of Jim’s mouth as, one by one, the automobiles’ engines did ignite — all except the Celica’s.

“Fuck,” Bill Nixon said.

From the crowd came a cry: “Jumper cables! Who’s got jumper cables?”

A minute later Abraham de Leon’s blue Dodge van advanced alongside Kunkel’s budding white hydrangeas. “Come on, Abe,” coaxed Jerry Henderson as the van growled past Jim’s driftwood mailbox and into the drive and toward him, toward Henderson, spotlit, now, in high-beam van light, waving his arms flight deck style, pointing a clear route to the stalled vehicle. I couldn’t help noticing how Abraham’s Dodge’s headlights threw Jerry Henderson’s shadow massively onto Jim’s oversized garage door: as Abraham approached, Jerry’s shadow, methodically, cryptically gesturing, grew; it loomed over us like an animate, pharaonic wall frieze.

I asked Jim, “Hey, do you know anything about Egyptian religion?”

“No. And Pete, could you please loosen these knots? I mean, if this is going to take all night?”

I watched Jerry, Bill, and Abraham fiddling with cables and plugs. I saw Tom Thompson leaning on his parked Mazda. I saw men I knew mixing with others I didn’t, all muttering to one another or looking away, as though no hogtied person lay at the center of this green place. It was as if boundaries had been painted. No one outside seemed willing to acknowledge the interior space or its contents — me and Jim — and it seemed to me, then, that this might be characteristic of what some call holy ground, and that the boundary was drawn of shame. With this in mind I said to Jim, “It’s not for me to loosen your bonds,” and began telling about Osiris King of Kings, son of Earth and Sky, who was deceived into entering his own coffin, which drifted down the Nile and was delivered to Set, King of the Underworld; and about how the corpse was cut into pieces; and how the pieces were scattered east, west, north, south, across the land; a hand here, a foot there, buried in holy graves.

“That’s beautiful,” Jim said.

Over by the umbilically linked cars, Jerry counseled, “Try her again.” Abraham de Leon juiced his V-8 to a high-RPM whine. Bill Nixon’s Celica clattered, spit, and caught. “All right!” Abe cheered, tastelessly, as he backed the van into the hydrangeas. Jerry lowered the Celica’s hood, then called out to all the drivers waiting like impatient race contestants, “Let’s do this thing!”

It was my cue to back off. Everywhere, people melted away from the center, even those already standing thirty, forty feet distant. “Get away from there,” mothers called to children. No one knew what this event might possibly involve in the way of spectator risk, so everybody got out of the yard, beyond cars, mailboxes, streetlight posts, citrus trees, deep into night’s shadow across Dune Road. Everybody but me. I was listening to Jim’s last words: