James Hynes - Next

Kevin’s not sure. On the Lamar Avenue Bridge, the southbound traffic is backed all the way up the hill toward Gaia; halfway across the bridge, the front end of a small white car is accordioned under the rear bumper of an SUV, and two figures stand gesticulating in the heat. Kevin recognizes neither of them, but then he’s got it, what’s gone missing, what he’s lost: Kelly, Joy Luck, the Girl Who Walks Like Lynda, Kevin’s once and future lover. La belle dame sans merci, his last chance. He’s been flat on his back and bleeding from the leg long enough for her to vanish completely, as if she never existed in the first place. Her absence stings even worse than the scrape on his knee. He hasn’t just lost her, he’s lost the original Lynda, Lynda 1.0, Lynda Classic. Lynda on the dance floor, Lynda à la plage, Lynda on the railing.

“No,” says Kevin, and he starts walking again. As the three of them — four, if you count the dog — approach the end of the bridge, the fat guy blurts out a further apology.

“I’d offer to pay for the pants, sir?” he says. “But I’m sort of between jobs right now? But what I could do, I have a really nice pair of pants in my apartment — it’s not far from here? — and I could let you borrow them? Actually, you could have them, they’re a really nice pair of pants…”

Beyond the trees at the end of the bridge Kevin can see the flash of a passing car. He stops and sighs and looks the guy up and down. Kevin’s not particularly proud of much, but he is proud of the fact that at age fifty, he’s still wearing a 34-inch waist. This guy will never see the inside of 40 inches again. The kid notices Kevin looking, but Kevin doesn’t care.

“I’ve had them for a while.” Even in the heat, the guy is blushing. “I can’t get into them anymore—”

“It’s okay.” Kevin waves him away. “Don’t worry about it.”

The kid, Kevin can see, wants nothing more than to be let off the hook, and Kevin, even though he’s hot, angry, and frustrated, can’t for the life of him see any reason to make this boy more uncomfortable than he already is. Kevin’s a midwestern college-town liberal not just by accident of birth, but by temperament. It’s in his bones to see both sides of a question, and even now he knows just how this boy is feeling — simultaneously guilty and resentful, wanting to do the right thing but afraid he’ll have to pay for something that he doesn’t really think is his fault. Times like this, Kevin wishes he were a Republican, full of absolute certainty and righteous, tribal wrath: he’d yell at the guy, threaten to sue him, offer to visit some Old Testament shock and awe on the kid’s fat ass. He could even have the dog impounded — and then the very thought pierces Kevin’s congenitally bleeding heart, because the spaniel is looking up at his plump master with a goofy, endearing look of pure devotion. At the very least he should dress the kid down, tell him (like Kevin’s mother would) that some people shouldn’t be allowed to have dogs if they can’t keep them under control. But Kevin can’t even muster enough righteous anger to do that. Not to mention the Amazon is watching them both: if he loses his cool in front of her, she might leave him here, bleeding and limping, to fend for himself in a strange city. Suddenly I’m Blanche Dubois, thinks Kevin, depending on the kindness of strangers.

“Seriously,” Kevin says, softening his tone, “I’m not mad. I got a couple hours, I’ll just go buy another pair of pants. Don’t worry about it.”

He turns away, but the kid, God bless him, says, “I could give you my address, so when I get a job I could pay you back…”

Twenty years or so ago, Kevin stood with a weeping Rooster on the sticky roof of Uncle Stan’s bakery in Hamtramck and watched the popemobile glide between mobbed sidewalks under listless Polish flags along Joseph Campau Avenue, and he saw John Paul II in his bulletproof cube like an action figure in its original packaging, gently slicing the air from side to side before him. Now Kevin makes the same benedictory gesture.

“Ego te absolvo,” he says to the boy with the dog. “Go and sin no more.” Before the boy can say anything else, Kevin limps away alongside the Amazon.

“That was nice of you,” she says.

Kevin shrugs. His nerves are still jangling from his fall, his emotions are right at the surface, and the last thing he wants to do is lose it in front of this rather intense woman. He exaggerates his limp a bit so that he can hang back and get a grip on himself. And also, though this wasn’t his first thought, so that he can check her out from behind. She’s certainly powerful-looking. He likes leanness in a woman, but actual muscles, like this woman’s got, don’t do much for him. The fact that he’s not automatically attracted to her worries him a bit — is it possible that he’s not turned on by a woman that he doesn’t think he could overpower? Sometimes with Beth sex used to be a kind of wrestling match, and he’d enjoyed grappling with her as much as (so far as he knew) she’d enjoyed grappling with him, until he’d pinned her, breathless, to the bed. It wasn’t always like this, of course, but often enough, right to the end of their time together. What does that say about him? All these years later, does it turn out that Shulamith Firestone was right all along, that all men are rapists deep down? This woman is certainly solid, almost brawny, with a formidable gravitas; her military bearing tells him that she doesn’t suffer fools gladly. If he tried to pin this woman to a bed, no matter how playfully, she’d break his neck. As he follows her off the pedestrian bridge and along the street toward a narrow parking lot under the looming, rusting span of the railroad trestle, Kevin gratefully leaps at the possibility that it’s her humorlessness, not her strength, that turns him off. That’s it, that’s the problem: it’s not who would win two out of three takedowns, it’s that he’s never known how to deal with a woman if he couldn’t make her laugh.

“How you doing?” she says without looking at him, and from a pocket of her running shorts she pulls a key remote and clicks it. The lights of an enormous, shiny red pickup truck blink and chirp.

“I’m hot.” Limping up to the truck, Kevin takes off his jacket and splays his fingers under the collar so he can slap the dust off the back of it. No rips, thank God, no permanent scrapes. If he’d had to replace the jacket, then he really would be angry.

“You’re a little overdressed for the trail, don’t you think?” Now the Amazon smiles back at him. It’s a knowing smile, showing some bright teeth. Okay, thinks Kevin, she’s capable of irony, that’s a start. She opens the driver’s door and pats the seat, and he climbs up into the baking heat of the cab and sits sideways in the bucket seat with his jacket folded across his lap and his knees sticking out the door. Meanwhile she leans over the side of the truck bed and rattles around in a big plastic storage box. His scrape is really burning now, and his sock is sticky and warm where the blood has soaked into it. New trousers, new socks — he draws the line at a new pair of shoes, no matter how much blood soaks into one of them. A hundred and fifty dollar shoes, he reminds himself, his anger flaring again. He slumps sideways in the seat, his temple against the padded headrest, the heat at his back even worse than the heat outside, the glitter from the traffic at the end of the Lamar bridge getting to him even through his sunglasses. Maybe I should just pack it in, he thinks, call a cab, go back to the airport, fly home. I can’t live in this wretched heat, in this merciless sunlight, surrounded by upscale Gaians and mouthy homeless guys and fat slackers with clumsy spaniels. Not to mention brawny, imperious women who could break me in two. I can’t take it. I’m not engineered for it.