Jeffery Allen - Holding Pattern - Stories

“No?”

“No.” Ward tugged and pulled at the tongue of one shoe as he began to squeeze and wiggle and stomp his foot inside it.

“Indeed. Not surprising, your curious—”

“Why don’t we just go?”

“—range of reasoning.”

“Kindly spare me the sermon.”

“Certainly. They don’t pay me to preach. What would you care to hear? You would care to hear that—”

“We have someplace to go.” He squeezed in the second foot and stood.

“No? Perhaps if I kneeled down and—”

“You wallow!”

The police superintendent popped upright on the bed. “Nothing could wallow like you.” He sat there on the bed staring up at Ward, his still form merged with the coarse sheets, the iron cot, a carved figure leaning out in relief from the substance that contained it. The radiator popped and hissed in the silence.

“Are we going to sit here all day?”

“May you rot.”

“Take comfort in the thought.” Ward lifted his overcoat from its closet hook and slipped inside it, his body mockingly insubstantial, the padded wrapping loose on his frame, like a hospital gown. But the police superintendent made no effort to move, anchored to stubborn place, unable to pull his hate back inside him link by link.

“Why don’t I meet you downstairs,” Ward said.

These words might have gone unheard or escaped comprehension. It was only when Ward started for the door that the police superintendent took to his feet and blocked his exit. He smacked his palms against his trouser legs to rid them of lint, shook the lapels of his overcoat, and brushed his hair flat with the sides of his hands. Then he eased around Ward, lifted his white derby from the windowsill, and fitted it onto his head. He pulled the door open — he did not hurry — and motioned for Ward to go through.

The winter sky was high and clear above short snowbanked streets. White wonder, enormous pancakelike flakes falling to the earth in rapid succession, blown aloft again in fierce twirlings. A car idled in fixed brilliance, all metal and glass. The hard-of-muscle young officer who’d guarded Ward’s room tugged harder at Ward’s elbow. Ward bent into the car and settled back onto the rear passenger seat. The officer slammed his door tight against the wind and cold, and in that instant, the front passenger door hinged open, snow rushing in with malicious intentions of beating the police superintendent to his seat. Only when his door slammed shut did he thoroughly examine his white derby for damage. The young officer took the other end of the rear passenger seat and shut the door. He turned his face to the glass, a full yard of leathered space between him and Ward. A second uniformed officer positioned himself behind the steering wheel and eased the smooth-running car forward. “Coldest day of the year,” he said, black-gloved fingers drumming on the wheel.

Ward thought about what the gloves kept out and all that they kept in. Hoping to calm himself, he brushed snow from his coat, removed his own gloves, and blew hot air into the well of his joined hands. The wipers switched back and forth across the windshield like lascivious buttocks. A second car moved ahead of them, venting smoke. A third car behind.

“Coldest so far.”

“You’re a genius,” Ward said. “Now turn up the goddamn heat.”

“What?” The driver craned his neck to look back over the seat. Perhaps he would steer the car with one hand and shoot Ward with the other. “You want to repeat that?”

“You heard me.”

“Officer,” the police superintendent said, “do the honor. Turn up the heat.”

The driver shot a quick unprotesting glance at his superior and clicked on the blower.

“Thanks, you cocksucker.”

The police superintendent looked at Ward’s reflection in the rearview mirror. “Take a moment or two, if you must.”

Ward offered no reply, only sat rubbing his palms together. The blower roaring like an untamed beast.

“That warm enough for you?” the driver asked.

“No. Have your mother send up a fagot or two from hell.”

The driver began rocking from side to side in his seat, his fingers tapping anxious rhythms on the steering wheel. The police superintendent gave him a sharp look, and he pressed his shoulders into his seat, the dark shape of his head looking straight ahead, through the snow-repellent windshield.

“Kiss him once for me, would you?” Ward said to the police super intendent.

The police superintendent turned around in his seat and gave Ward his familiar look of disgust. He shook his head slowly from side to side. “Who would have ever thought.”

“Certainly not you.”

The ride was otherwise uneventful, the streets specked with people, black forms silhouetted against the snow.

“Here”—the police superintendent dropped a ring of keys into Ward’s lap, letting them fall from his hand with the highest form of disregard, a soiled-nose wipe—“the keys to the city.”

“You’re so thoughtful.” Ward deftly deposited the keys into some inside pocket of his coat. He looked over and saw that the young officer who had kept vigil outside his door was snickering into his upturned jacket collar. When they made it to their destination, this same officer pulled Ward from the car and rudely bumped him and shoved him into the snow, but in such a way as to make the action seem accidental, an inadvertent trip over the curb. Ward regained his feet, brushed snow from his clothes, retrieved his scattered thoughts, and patted his pockets to be sure that the keys were still there, showing no concern that his outer garments were thoroughly soaked through. Then the police superintendent took a firm hold of Ward’s gloved hand and led him forward as if he were a child on the first day of school. Black and slick, his streamlined shoes jumped above the snow, one after the other, like dolphins.

They had walked some fifty paces, Ward’s breath coming a little harder with every step, when the police superintendent stopped as if on cue and spun Ward in front of him like a practiced dancer.

“Please sign, here and here.”

Ward did as instructed. The police superintendent slipped the damp form into his jacket and stood before Ward under his white derby, the hat tiny on his massive head, like some ghastly baby bonnet. “I would be lying if I said it has been a pleasure.”

“Spare me.”

The police superintendent turned and headed back for his car and left Ward to the snow and wind. Ward vowed to take away with him some memory of the man. However, the weather being what it was, he was already having trouble remembering exactly how the man’s features fit together. So much so that Ward considered calling out to him and requesting a quick but comprehensive physical inventory, fully aware that, in all likelihood, the police super intendent would not acquiesce. But instead, he looked through the neutral and colorless distance and saw an old five-story walk-up building slanting away from the ground — a splinter angling up from skin — at a precarious angle, snow swirling around the structure as if to lasso it upright. His appointed destination. What was keeping it standing? He turned a last time to look at the police super intendent, who was now leaning against the car — white derby snugly atop his head — where the two young officers were hunched over, sharing a cigarette. Uniformed men from supporting vehicles worked to cordon off the street with brass barricades they took from the trunks of their own cars, in a shared geometry of secrecy and isolation.

Ward reached into his coat pocket for the ring of keys but fumbled them against his chest into the snow. At once he dropped to his knees, biting at the ends of his gloved fingers until his hands were free of the leather. He stuck his bare fists into the snow and began clawing about — hungry bear or ice fisherman — reacting to the cold in an almost clinical way, the snow both surprising and mundane. He scooped up two fistfuls and weighed them in each palm, and he told himself that he would do better to avoid any new feelings and impressions he was not yet conscious of, which he had not possessed in years. However, his proximity to the earth allowed him to see that snow was actually rising up from the street and fleeing into the heavens — an impossible journey, as the domed sky would allow no escape. No sadness at the realization, for the thought took hold of him: at this very moment he was kneeling at the very center of the world, at its cold icy navel. He trembled to shake himself free.