Chris Bachelder - The Throwback Special

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.