Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

The children’s librarian is living with her cruel thing. We have forgiven her. We go into the children’s room. She is silent behind the desk cutting out Santa Clauses or Easter eggs or autumn leaves, which children will cover with cotton balls and glitter. We talk to the finches, those filthy creatures. We imagine opening the cage and telling them to go ahead — it wouldn’t be the first time — they should go ahead and fly. Even though we don’t open the door, we tell them anyhow. Stranger things, we tell them, have happened.

In the December rain, the buildings around the town square were the color of dirty fingernails. Still, the French had tried to jolly things up a bit. Decorations hung from streetlamps, though at midday, Tony couldn’t tell what lit bulbs would reveal at night: A curried prawn? A goiter? People had dangled toddler-size nylon Father Christmases out their windows, each with a shoulder-borne sack of presents. There were dozens of Father Christmases, and they hung slack, sodden, like snagged kites. They looked lynched.

Tony drove the rattletrap Escort he’d just bought around Bazaillac’s covered market a second time. He and Izzy and the kids had lived in the countryside nearby for eleven years. At the start, people in town called them Les Anglais , because they were the only ones. Now the whole valley was overrun with English. You could fly into Bergerac for three quid on Ryanair, flash the mere cover of your passport to the on-duty Frenchman, and strike out. You could buy an old presbytery or millhouse for next to nothing, turn the outbuildings into gîtes and rent them for the summer, and then sit back and live the good life — or so the English thought. They renovated or half-renovated the properties and then lost interest, complained about how many other English were in the area: you couldn’t go into a market without being assaulted by the terrible voices of your countrymen. Tony had heard that Slovenia and Macedonia were the new places to go. He wished Slovenia and Macedonia luck.

In the meantime he was looking for his son. The car was a present for him, and Tony was now struck by a problem: he wanted to hand Malcolm the keys and walk away, but Malcolm, if he were found, would be drunk, wanting to keep drinking, and then how would Tony get home?

They’d figure it out, he decided.

Sunday, winter: nothing was open but Bar le Tip Top on one side of the square, and the Café du Commerce on the opposite. Both were pretty much Anglophone bars now. The frivolous drinkers might start out in the Tip Top and then cross under the covered market to the Commerce for a change of scenery. The serious drinkers stayed put at the Commerce. Tony’s son, Malcolm, was a serious drinker.

Between the rain on the outside and the smoke and condensation on the inside, the Commerce window was a blur of fairy lights and whitewashed lunch specials. The arcade was deep, and in good weather, Emile, the owner, set up tables under the arches; now there was only a creaking signboard listing the day’s menu. Tony stared at the door and tried to will Malcolm through it, but Malcolm had never once stopped drinking because of Tony’s will or wishes or pleas or even — embarrassingly, Tony hated to remember it — tears. He looked back across the square. A fat man ambled underneath the market roof: Sid, another serious drinker, whom Tony knew from his own days of serious drinking. Tony honked. Sid turned, his gray beard tinseled with wet, his bald head cloud-colored in the market’s shadows. In his peach sweatpants and jacket he looked like the washing-up cloth of the gods, soaked and proud. The Escort’s window required three hands to open, so Tony cracked the door instead. Sid pulled it open.

“Good God,” said Sid. He leaned his head into the car. “Where’d the car come from? Bloody Knight Rider .”

“What?” said Tony.

“ Knight Rider . You’ve seen that program. Talking car? Hasselhoff?”

“No idea,” said Tony. “Have you seen Malcolm? The car’s for him. Christmas present.” He’d bought it from a fleeing Italian. He didn’t know whether a car would make a difference, but he hoped so.

“Reminds me,” said Sid. “Where are you off to? The house? I have something for you.”

Someone shouted from the door of the Commerce. Not Malcolm. The Maori ex-footballer stepped out, smiling expansively. His English girlfriend — someone else’s wife — hooked her chin on his shoulder and stared in desolation. She had money. The Maori was a kept man. Together they looked like the masks of comedy and tragedy on a proscenium arch.

Sid stood up and his stomach, an impressive spherical object, came into the car, crowding Tony over. “ Knight Rider , hey?” he called across. He pounded on the roof of the car.

“HahahahahaHA!” said the Maori, nodding in his disconcerting, rapid-fire way. “Sid! Absolutely! You drinking, Sidney?”

Sid leaned back into the car. These days he was mostly Malcolm’s friend, though he was Tony’s age. He had the unsavory charisma of a man on a remote island who’d let himself be worshipped by the natives as a god, who might even use his watch and pocket torch as signs of his divinity. “You going home, yeah?” he said to Tony. “I have something to bring you. Be over in a tick. One jar and I’m there. All right?”

“Have you seen Malcolm?” Tony repeated.

“No, mate,” said Sid. “Not for a few days.”

“Ask the Maori, is he in the bar?”

“Christ, you think he’s a Maori? He’s a sham. He only claims— ”

“Ask him.”

Sid sighed and straightened up, and the stomach reasserted itself. “Colin?” he called across the car. “Malcolm back?”

The Maori laughed and shook his head.

“Sorry, mate,” Sid told Tony, slapping the top of the car again. “See you in a bit.”

Tony watched him cross over. Beneath the arcade, the Maori tried to faire la bise , but Sid did not submit to kisses; Sid ducked. They went inside. All the various Irish Johns would be there, too. There were so many now, according to Malcolm, they had to number them: John the Irish One, John the Irish Two, and so on. They were up to John the Irish Eight.

In the wintertime the Commerce was filled with the skint and the rowdy. Any one of the regulars could be accused of drinking himself to death, but all together and out in public and in France, they were merely living the good life. Who wouldn’t rather drink himself to death in a foreign country? Your mother couldn’t nag you, the wine was cheap. You weren’t in danger of drinking yourself to mere ruined health.

The Commerce had been his and Izzy’s local when they could still afford bars, back before the bankruptcy. They went every night under the pretense of improving their French. It was a long, dark, friendly bar, with a snooker table in the middle and a vending machine that dispensed cans of nuts at the front. The girls and Malcolm loved that machine; they were practically brought up at its foot. They’d turn the big cold key that worked the mechanism and check for fallen coins or cans of peanuts, even though Emile put out baskets of peanuts for free.

Malcolm had been ten years old when he’d come to France. He’d been living with his mother and stepfather, and one night the stepfather had called up Tony. “He’s hard to get along with, this kid. Don’t you think?” No, Tony didn’t think. If Malcolm had a fault, it was that he got along too well, with angels and sinners: his teachers cried when they had to punish him. At any rate he was put on the ferry, and Tony had met him, and brought him to the house to live with him and his stepmother and stepsisters, and together they went nightly to a bar, where the boy learned to speak French and to drink hard without ever taking a lesson in either. At that front table he turned from a cowering child into a charming sot.