Siegel, James - Derailed

It was one thing to joke around twice a day with a man who delivered your mail, to ask him what left-handed baseball player had the highest batting average in history, to trade wisecracks and earned run averages. It was another thing to go drinking with him. I wasn’t sure Winston would want to go drinking with me.

On the other hand, hadn’t we traded confidences? Or hadn't one of us done that? And now the other ready to do the same? But that brought me to the other reason I hadn’t been able to just walk up to Winston and suggest a drink.

Winston blew on his hands. He waltzed through a traffic light, narrowly avoiding a taxicab seemingly intent on mayhem. Winston stopped at a pretzel man and asked how much.

I was close enough to make out the words. I wished Winston would turn around and acknowledge me. A few more blocks and I was in danger of freezing to death.

Across the street was a Catholic mission with a biblical statement I remembered from Sunday school emblazoned over its door: “Oh Lord, the sea is so large and my boat is so small." True enough, I thought.

When I looked back toward Winston, he wasn’t there. I ran over to the pretzel man and asked him where his last customer had gone to.

“Eh?” the pretzel man said.

“The tall guy you just sold a pretzel to. Did you see where he went?”

“Eh?”

The man was Lebanese, maybe. Or Iranian. Or Iraqi. Whatever he was, he couldn’t speak English.

“One dolla,” he said.

I said never mind. I walked away and thought: I will talk to Winston tomorrow. Or maybe tomorrow I will change my mind and not talk to him at all.

Someone grabbed me by the arm.

I don’t want a pretzel, I started to say. But it wasn’t the pretzel man.

“Okay, Charles,” Winston said, “why the fuck are you following me?”

TWENTY-ONE

On Christmas Eve I got drunk.

The problem was my mother-in-law’s special eggnog, the special part being that it was two-thirds rum.

“Come to Daddy,” I said to Anna after I’d finished one and a half of them, but she didn’t seem to like that idea.

“You look dopey,” she said to me.

“Are you drunk, Charles?” Deanna asked me.

“Of course not.”

Mrs. Williams had an upright piano that must’ve been seventy years old. Deanna had taken lessons on it until she’d mutinied at ten years old and said enough. No more “Heart and Soul” and “Für Elise.” Mrs. Williams had never quite forgiven her for that; her punishment was having to bang out Christmas songs on the piano we were all forced to sing to. “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” for instance. Neither Deanna nor I was particularly religious, but there are no atheists in foxholes. I belted out, “God and sinners reconcile . . .” as though my life depended on it, my syncopation slightly askew, as I was already into my third eggnog.

“You are drunk, Daddy,” Anna said dourly. She liked singing songs with Grandma about as much as she liked giving herself shots.

“Don’t talk to your father like that,” Deanna said, stopping in midchord. Deanna, my defender and protectress.

“I’m not drunk — both of you,” I said. “Want to see me walk a straight line?”

Apparently not.

Instead Anna snorted and said: “Do we have to sing these stupid songs?”

“. . . . in Bethlehem,” I sang, focusing on the Christmas star on top of the tree. It was faded from years of use, no longer sparkling the way it’d been when Anna needed to be held up in my arms during the Christmas sing-alongs to see it. A tarnished star now; you could see that it wasn’t a star at all — just papier-mâché pockmarked with glue.

“Well, that was fun,” Mrs. Williams said when we finished. Then when no one answered her, “ Wasn’t it?”

“Yep,” I said. “Let’s sing another.”

“Get bent,” Anna said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means no, ” Deanna said.

“That’s what I thought it meant,” I said. “Just checking.”

“No more eggnog for you,” Mrs. Williams said.

“But I love your eggnog.”

“I think you love it too much. Who’s going to drive home?”

“I will,” Deanna said.

“When are we going?” Anna asked.

After dinner, we opened Mrs. Williams’s presents. Anna would get hers tomorrow morning: two new CDs, including one by Eminem. Two tops from Banana Republic. And a cell phone. These days if you didn’t have a phone of your own, you were some kind of dweeb. After all, you never knew whom you’d need to call: a girlfriend, a boyfriend, an ambulance.

Mrs. Williams received a lovely new sweater from Saks. She dutifully thanked us all — even me, who of course had no idea what was going to come out of the box.

“I’d like to propose a toast,” I said.

“I took away your eggnog,” Deanna said.

“I know. That’s why I want to propose a toast.”

“Geez, Charles, what’s gotten into you?”

“I know what’s gotten into him,” Mrs. Williams said. “My eggnog.”

“Damn fine eggnog, too,” I complimented her.

“Charles.” Deanna looked mad.

Anna giggled and said: “Oh my, Daddy said ‘damn.’ Call the police.”

“No,” I said. “No police. Not a good idea.”

“Huh?”

“Just kidding.”

Mrs. Williams had put up some coffee. “Coffee, anyone?” she asked.

“I’m sure Charles would love some,” Deanna said. As it happened, I wouldn’t have loved some. It was clearly a plot; they were trying to sober me up.

Meanwhile Anna was whispering to Deanna. Something about getting off her back. “I’m behaving fine,” I heard her say.

I’d sunk into the living room couch and was wondering if I’d be able to get up when the time came to leave.

“How’s your nose, Charles?” Mrs. Williams asked me.

“Still there,” I said, and touched it for her. “See?”

“Oh, Charles . . .”

Mrs. Williams had put on the TV station with the yuletide log. I stared into the flames and started to drift. It felt warm and pleasant. Until I began drifting into dangerous waters and it became unpleasant. That frozen street corner in the city.

The Charles that was all liquored up with the holiday spirit was screaming at me not to think about it.

But I couldn’t help it.

I don’t want a pretzel, I'd started to say. Remember?

I’d wanted something else.

Okay, Charles, why the fuck are you following me?

Winston with his arm casually around my shoulder, although I could feel the strength in it, and what’s more, I thought Winston wanted me to feel that strength.

“I wasn’t following you,” I said. Lying seemed to be my first instinct here — and besides, I wasn’t following Winston as much as procrastinating about following him.

“Yes, you were. Sing Sing gave me eyes in the back of my head, remember?”

“I was just going to ask you to have a beer. Really.”

“Why? You finally figured out the seven players with eleven letters in their last names?”

“I’m still working on that one,” I said, not exactly sure how to proceed.

“So why didn’t you just ask me? If you wanted to have a beer so badly?”

“I saw you walking a block ahead. I was just trying to catch up.”

“Okay,” Winston said. “So let’s have a beer.”

And he smiled.

We went to a place called O’Malley’s, which looked very much like what you would expect a place called O’Malley’s to look like. It had a pool table in the back, a dartboard in the corner, and a TV tuned to an Australian football match. It had two resident drunks, at least I assumed they were more or less regulars, since one of them had his head laid flat on the bar and the bartender wasn’t bothering to wake him. The other one Winston knew, because he said, “Hey, man,” and briefly clapped him on the back when we walked by.