James Hynes - Next

A jogger is coming toward him up the spiral ramp, another Latina Amazon like the soldier in the airport, or the bustling woman in the tight skirt on Congress. Only this one is older than the soldier and younger than the businesswoman, a no-nonsense woman in her thirties, glossy hair pulled scalp-tight, powerful thighs pistoning as she charges up the ramp, black eyes fierce on either side of her sharp Aztec nose. Her fists clench and unclench as she runs, her shoes slap the pavement, her breath comes in sharp bursts, huh-huh-huh-huh. She pounds by him without a glance, close enough for him to smell the ammoniac tang of her sweat, her ponytail whipping like a lash.

And there’s Kelly halfway across the bridge, tightly gripping the railing with both hands, gazing back along the river at Austin’s boomtown skyline. He can’t see her face from here, can’t read her expression, but her hair is pushed back behind her ear, the ends of it plastered to the long, lovely curve of her neck. If he gets a little closer, maybe he can read her mood, guess what she’s thinking, figure out what to say to her. He moves along the bridge, which is wide and sinuous and paved with cream and pink lanes of concrete, with square planters and green benches along the sides. Kelly is standing at a buffed steel railing next to a short lamppost with a flat steel shade like a monsignor’s hat, and now she’s gazing up at a little single-engine plane buzzing high over the river, dragging behind it a limp orange banner that Kevin can’t quite read. HOT something. Or is it OTT? As the plane banks back toward the skyline in the breathless heat, the banner only folds a different way instead of straightening, and Kevin sees the letters ERS . Can that be right? Is someone paying to advertise OTTERS over Austin, Texas?

Well, there’s your opening line, thinks Kevin, edging forward. His feet are burning, and he’s pretty sure the sour odor he smells now is not the sluggish river, but the steam from his own armpits, under his jacket. Despite the utter lack of wind, the buzzing of the little plane comes and goes; maybe the heat dampens the sound. He’s hoping Kelly is as puzzled by the banner as he is.

“ ‘Otters’?” he’ll say.

But won’t she freak when she sees it’s the guy from the seat next to her on the airplane? Or what if it’s worse — what if she doesn’t recognize him at all? She hasn’t yet; she walked right past him in the coffeehouse and the grocery store, and somehow she hasn’t noticed him treading after her like a faithful mutt for the last hour. Could it be that he’s that anonymous, that middle-aged? Now he knows why his father sang melancholy Sinatra in the shower, and the memory of his father’s bass-baritone — too low for Sinatra, he strained for the high notes — unexpectedly tightens his throat. It kills Kevin to think he never put it together, the difference between what his father sang when he was alone and thought no one could hear, and what he sang when he was harmonizing with his SPEBSQSA buddies two Saturdays a month, one hideous old chestnut after another: By the liiiight… (by the light, by the light)… of the silvery mooooon… (that silv’ry moon!).

“Oh God,” Kevin used to moan, slouching into the family room where Mom watched TV with the sound way up, while Dad and his florid friends preserved and encouraged barbershop quartet singing in America from the paneled basement below, “make it stop. ”

“Shh.” His mother cradled her drink in one hand and with the other aimed the huge remote at the Zenith, clicking M*A*S*H up even louder.

“He can’t hear me,” Kevin whined.

“I don’t care if he can hear you,” said his mother. “I’m trying to watch Alan Alda.”

“Fuck Alan Alda,” muttered Kevin.

“What’s that?” She heard that, even over the tinny laughter from the Zenith.

“Nothing.” Slouching away again, down the hall toward his room.

“What did you say, young man?”

“ Nothing, okay? Jee- zus.” Rolling his eyes as the idiot laugh track swelled and the blowhards in the basement swung with terrifying enthusiasm into some awful tune from The Music Man. Oh Lida Rose, oh, Lida Rose, oh, you put the sun back in the skyyyyy … God! Another Saturday night in Royal fucking Oak, the armpit of the fucking universe. Another fucking Saturday night in hell. He slammed his bedroom door and switched on the stereo, twirling the volume as high as it would go, to WRIF. The fucking turntable was broken and he’d spent all his money last week on weed — weak shit, too, fucking worthless — and the thought of that stalled him in the middle of his littered bedroom floor while Arthur Penhallow breathed heavily out of the speakers. If only Mom’d have another highball, he could tiptoe past her snoring on the sectional couch and ride his ten-speed up Twelve Mile to the mall, where he was pretty sure he could score some better weed off a guy who worked at Spencer Gifts. Worse yet, ’RIF was bumming him out; it’s always fucking “Stairway to Heaven” or fucking Bob Seger or J. fucking Geils — and tonight it’s fucking “Aqualung,” he fucking hates that song. So he switched the stereo off and flung himself onto his bed and piled both pillows over his face and screamed as loud as he could, “I wish I was an ORPHAN!”

And later that evening, he was halfway there. Cruising home at eleven with no light on his bike, standing on the pedals, his pupils dilated wide as dimes, he found an ambulance in the driveway and a police car at the curb, and the Murrays and the Nowakowskis on his front lawn. Mrs. Murray and Mrs. Nowakowski each struck the same pose, one arm pressed across her midriff, one hand pressed to her mouth. Mr. Murray stood with his arms crossed talking in low tones to Mr. Nowakowski, who had his hands thrust in his pockets. Nancy Nowakowski, with whom Kevin had almost lost his virginity another Saturday night not long before—“Aren’t we naughty?” he’d said to her before she peeled his hand off her warm breast — Nancy gave him a look of wide-eyed pity, brushing his arm in passing with her fingertips as he dropped his bike on the grass and went up the steps. Inside, in the living room, his gawky sister, Kathleen, all knees and elbows, was doubled over on the sofa, sobbing, while Mom’s priest, Father Vince, perched on the cushion next to her and patted her awkwardly on the back. Kevin floated through the room toward the hallway, at the end of which he could see his mother standing just outside the master bedroom in the same pose as Mesdames Murray and Nowakoski, arm over midriff as if she’d been punched, hand to her mouth. Kevin’s growing alarm sparked uselessly through the fog of his high like a flint that wouldn’t light, and a cop like a middle linebacker stopped Kevin by putting his beefy hands on Kevin’s shoulders and looked knowingly into the boy’s dilated pupils.

“Are you Kevin?” he said with surprising tenderness.

Wow, thinks Kevin on the bridge. He turns his back on Kelly and palms the tears out of the corners of his eyes. I don’t need this now, I really, really don’t, but there’s no stopping it: thirty-five years later, the night of his father’s death can still sneak up on him. Sitting on the end of the bed after his barbershop buddies went home, Kevin’s father died as he bent over to untie his shoes, a pair of Hush Puppies that he wore around the house. Mom was talking to him through their open bathroom door. She saw him puff out his cheeks and pat his stomach as if he had indigestion, then she turned away. When she turned back, he was already dead, in a heap on the carpet. It was that quick. Unlike Grandpa Quinn’s death later in a morphine fog from colon cancer, which was slow and unpleasant and as well- attended as an English king’s, half a dozen people crowded into the bedroom watching each whispery breath from his blue lips, Kevin’s father vanished when no one was looking. No one ever talked to Kevin about it, so everything he knows about what a heart attack is like is from that old Richard Pryor routine, and the older he gets, the more he thinks about it, not just because it might foreshadow what will happen to him, but because he can’t help but wonder what his father thought in that last moment. Was it painful? Did he feel a blow to the chest? A seam of fire up his left arm? Did he hear the voice of God, pace Pryor, telling him to stay down, motherfucker? Was it a good way to go, not seeing it coming, not having to think about it, blindsided by death? Did his life fast-forward before his eyes? Was he scared? Was he resigned? Was he relieved? Annoyed? Angry? Did he think it was funny to die like that, bending over to untie your Hush Puppies, with your wife ignoring you from across the room? Did he even know it was happening, or was it, now you see me, now you don’t? Going, going, gone. Did he snuff out like a candle, like a spark floating away from a fire? Or did he just bend over into oblivion, like someone diving into dark water?