Killing Time in Crystal City Read online

  “Fair enough, fair enough,” he said, first holding up his hands like he was stopping traffic, then patting me on the chest warmly with them. “So, let me ask, would you say yes to dinner at my house this time?”

  I actually focus for a couple seconds, on the sensation caused by his simply putting his hands flat on my chest. Nice. Human contact, even small measures, was a very welcome something I had been missing.

  “If you didn’t invite me, I was just going to invite myself.”

  • • •

  As we walked up the stairs to Jasper’s second-floor apartment, I remembered my remark about Dad’s house and how I didn’t own anything. I regretted my tone, and my presumption that owning property was just a happy natural something, like beards or breasts, that would eventually come to everybody.

  “Is your mother not here?” I asked as I sat at his tidy pine kitchen table. It had three matching chairs, with the fourth side pushed up to a wall.

  “Nah, Ma works these hours usually. She’s a cook, so that means most nights around now she’s cooking a lot of other folks their dinner while I am cooking my own. Sort of like we’re cooking together, only separately. On her off nights, though, we cook together, only together.”

  It got to me, that last bit. “That’s, pretty great, Jasper, the way you guys work.”

  He was systematically assembling items on the counter by the stove in preparation for his cooking. “Yeah. We’re cool, Ma and me.”

  I knew it was just the two of them living here, but I hadn’t asked about any other parties and possible whereabouts. Now, though, there didn’t seem to be any pieces missing.

  Naturally, I wanted to blurt out how I was jealous and he was lucky, and how I didn’t have anybody like that anywhere in my life. But I had learned at least enough to know that if I did any bellyaching now, I’d be doing it on an empty stomach and out on the street.

  Which would have been bad. My stomach, come to think of it, was looking forward to dinner.

  Jasper went at it like a professional diner chef. He flipped on a radio, which sat on a shelf above the stove, nestled in with all the little cylinders of spices. Classic rock played over his head and wafted my way while he threw ingredients at a big, snapping, popping, oily skillet. It was a heavy metal pan, that skillet, and could swiftly make a pancake out of any unruly diner.

  “Get back, or I will surely bash you,” he said when I ventured innocently toward his handiwork. “You’ll see it when it’s ready, which will be a couple more minutes. Till then you’ll just have to sit there and make do with the scent.”

  The scent would just about do all by itself.

  A song by the Supremes started up. Immediately, I was taken somewhere else as I recognized it as a personal favorite of my mother’s. She had very few favorites, as she was no great lover of music, so this was something. “The Happening,” that was the name of the song. It was a good choice for a person who was only going to have a few favorites. Made me bob my head in time.

  I scanned the room, just killing time. There wasn’t much room to scan anyway, and the wall right next to me on the table’s fourth side had a big framed picture of Jesus flashing his Sacred Heart down on everybody. I thought he was supposed to be more modest than that.

  He was useful, though, just to fill out a foursome if Jasper and his mother and I were playing pinochle or bridge or something. He obviously couldn’t play, but he’d look good filling the space, like those people they hire to cover for stars when they go to the bathroom during the Academy Awards show.

  I was thinking about Jesus and his heart filling one of those toilet seats at the Oscars when my phone blipped its text message signal. The Lord’s distraction must have caused me to open the message from Dad.

  I was afraid to tell you the plans. I was wrong.

  It could have been three hours I stared at that message but I only became aware of time again when Jasper slapped two big aromatic plates down on the table.

  “Oh,” I said, startled. Anyone would have been. “Did you just make all this? Just now?”

  He deposited the food, cutlery, condiments, and napkins on the table and then went back to the fridge. “No, I phoned for takeout and had it delivered. What did you think I was doing over there all that time?”

  “Well, cooking, of course,” I said. “But I meant, specifically, this, did you make this, like from the ground up as opposed to heating ready-made?” I bent low to inhale the vapors off what looked like the finest hash I had ever encountered. There was an extra-large poached egg settled bull’s-eye in the middle of it all, with barbecued beans and chunky buttered cornbread on the sides.

  “I guess that’s your version of a compliment to the chef, so thanks. Yes, I did every bit of it. Okay, not the cornbread. Ma gets to tuck away bits and pieces from work, off cuts of meat, produce that’s approaching sell-by, the kind of thing that isn’t of use to them but that makes dynamite casserole/hash/stir-fry kind of deals around here. Oh, and stale cornbread, which fries up spectacularly.”

  “Outrageous,” I said, talking through my food like a barbarian. The classic rock guys were sending us rockabilly something now, which was thoughtful.

  “Good, then Chef is pleased,” he said as he took the seat opposite me. He plunked down a big bottle of Coke and two pint glasses half filled with ice. Then, he started pouring from the main attraction.

  “What is that?” I asked when he had unloaded golden-brown something into each glass.

  “My mother’s dark rum,” he said, topping both glasses off with the Coke. He passed one over to me.

  “Should you be taking it?” I asked.

  He extended his glass across the table where it was met by mine and we achieved clink.

  “It was a gift from her boss, who got it as a gift himself. But he hates the stuff. Then she brought it home. We tried it the other night and lucky us, she hates it too. She told me it was all mine . . . but I suppose you can have a little.”

  “Lucky us,” I said.

  “A toast to the end of the school year,” he said, reclinking before drinking.

  “And the beginning of summer,” I said with a bit of a sneer.

  He frowned at me, but drank deeply.

  I drank, maybe a little less deeply, but enough to draw a conclusion.

  “Who in the world could not love this?” I said, looking at the glass like the answer was readable there. The rich heavy rum went right down into my stomach and spread out to warm all areas of my torso. I hadn’t done a great deal of drinking up to that point, but enough to know when something nice agreed with me and this was that something nice. Certainly something like a miracle was at work that could get the loveliness down into my belly and all up and tingly under my scalp at the same time.

  “Glad you like it,” he said. “Don’t let your food get cold. I wouldn’t want to see what all those scraps looked like if they congealed and tried to re-form into what they once were.”

  “Ha!” I said, finding the funny to way outweigh the queasy in that sequence. I applied myself to the task of conspicuous consumption, savoring every bite of every bit.

  And every sip and every slug.

  “I know,” Jasper said even though I was pretty sure I hadn’t said anything for him to agree with.

  “I know,” I said in turn to the glow-chested dinner companion levitating on my right. Jasper was leaning over and topping up my drink, which was approximately number three. It would have been tough to get a precise read on that because he was just alternating top-ups now, rather than mixing every time. A rum, then a Coke, then next time a rum again. They were practically the same color, so no matter.

  Ping. Text message.

  “Whoa, somebody’s suddenly popular,” he said as I retrieved it.

  Truth is summer planned long ago before you came. Vy complicated. Teaching. Peru. Brilliant opportunity
. Thought you would go back to Mom anyway. We should talk.

  “Uh-oh,” Jasper said, looking at my face.

  I handed him my phone, and went immediately back to the last few bites of my meal. Then I put down my fork and sat back, patting my belly with both hands like you’re supposed to at such moments.

  “Best meal I ever had, in my whole life, Jasper my friend. I cannot thank you enough.”

  From our opposite sides, we both made the same move, lurching across the table, as he handed back my phone and I collected my drink.

  “That’s not so great, huh?” he said, pointing at my phone as if that were necessary.

  I took a big gulp, and he joined in solidarity.

  “No, on the contrary,” I responded, looking at the phone in my hand, “I’ve found it to be an excellent phone.”

  There was a pause, then a dawning, then the two of us burst out in a huge, post-meal, tension-breaking laugh that made us sound like a whole barroom and diner all by ourselves. We got up then and started tidying up together with some grandstanding rock opera thing coming out of the radio and into us.

  He let me wash the dishes while he cleaned and straightened. And poured. The music was generous, not even pausing when Jasper reached up to the shelf with one hand to return the pepper grinder and the other hand to turn up the volume and only managed to drop both items clattering down on the stove top. We laughed at that one for about an hour.

  We talked, too, as the rum ran down and so did I. But that combination of factors was making comprehension and recall kind of like juggling three bowling pins when you can really only manage tennis balls. We talked about fathers. Turned out he did have one, but the rest of the story got away somewhere. Talked about the superior fathers we would be eventually. I remembered that, all of that, although the radio or the refrigerator could probably be superior to the fathers we had.

  We never even left the kitchen, which surely is the sign of a successful dinner party.

  My knees felt a little watery as I finished the washing and backed away from the sink. My everything felt a little watery, I noticed.

  “Thanks, so so much for everything, Jasper,” I said as I sloshed in the general direction of the door.

  “It’s gonna turn out all right,” he said.

  I turned around before getting through the kitchen doorway, and when I did, he was right there.

  “What?” I said.

  “Your Dad stuff. I know it looks shitty, but I still believe it’ll straighten out.”

  I heard my breath then, huff-puffing so fast through my nostrils, I almost believed it wasn’t me but the old train line that had suddenly come back to life just up the road.

  “I’m so angry, Jasper,” I said.

  “I understand how you feel, and you have every right,” he said. Then he did that warm-hands thing again on my chest.

  “I don’t want to go back there,” I said.

  “I wasn’t going to let you,” he said.

  SENSE OF PURPOSE

  You’d almost think I had places to be, things to do, by the bop in my walk now.

  My world is taking on something of a shape with the people I’ve met and the places I am finding. I know I need to go farther and figure out next moves and next moves beyond those, but right now what I’ve fallen into for a life doesn’t have me in a rush to climb back out again.

  “Ah, there you are, man,” Mickey says, giving me a hearty running-for-office handshake. It’s raining lightly, the sand is even more like dirt than usual, and Mickey’s wearing an oil-stained tan trenchcoat that would not be out of place in a spy movie from the 1930s, which is when the thing was last dry-cleaned. “Why aren’t we seeing more of you, Kikidiki?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, trying to look past him and all around without being too obvious about it.

  “The girls ain’t here, man. Nobody hangs around this depressing mud pit when it rains unless they got no options whatsoever. And girls, dude, girls always have options, know what I’m sayin’?” He laughs a hoarse and stoney laugh. “Lucky bitches, right?”

  “Right, I guess,” I say.

  Behind Mickey, his pals Tailbone and Howard have somehow commandeered a half-deflated rubber life raft and are huddled under it, smoking. Much of the smoke seems to be rolling up and getting stuck under the raft bottom by their heads and making what seems to be their own private noxious microclimate.

  “Sorry, brother,” Mickey says to me while gesturing toward them. “You want to come in out of the rain? It’s not much, but our shelter and bounty are yours to share.”

  I crouch down to try to get a glimpse of the guys’ raft-and-smoke-obscured faces. It’s out of morbid curiosity more than any real intention of joining them.

  “Hi, guys,” I say.

  They both wave. I straighten back up.

  “I appreciate the offer,” I say to Mickey. “But I think I’ll just continue on my way, see if I can catch up with the girls somewhere.”

  “Sure, sure. Wouldn’t expect them to show here anytime today. They were here yesterday, though. Both of ’em. Not together, though. First time I saw that big one—”

  “Stacey.”

  “Yeah, first time I saw Stacey on her own, and man, I was goin’ for it. I was practically goin’ pogo all the way up the beach to get to her, if you know what I’m sayin’, but then she just done like a scared rabbit and shot off before I got even close. I’m bettin’ there’s lots o’ bunny in that gal and I’m aimin’ to—”

  “Yeah, Mickey, right. What about Molly? She came by herself as well?”

  “No, dude, she had a dude. Seen him another time too, which is like, a relationship right there. They was here once before, and then twice yesterday, so that’s like, wedding bells and shit. Guy must be a priest or a bishop or somethin’ to get into impressin’ Good Golly Molly to that degree. Looked like a priest, actually, now that I think about it. Anyway, chicks ain’t everything. Don’t run off so fast, we want you to hang out.”

  “Another time,” I say, running now up the mucky beach.

  Crystal City is a grim place when it rains. Stray dogs in clumpy, matted pairs and threes seem to populate every vacant lot, both the lots and the mutts seemingly brought to life if you just add water. The streets are paved with the cheap-grade tarmac that causes car tires to make maddening, incessant sluck sounds as they roll by. Heat sticks to everything and seems to increase with the rain rather than there being any cooling benefit at all.

  Yesterday, bright and blue and balmy, I didn’t go to the beach when even Crystal Beach must have shined. Yesterday was my neighborhood day, my quiet, slow, drift day, which worked a treat and was just the right thing at just the right time. I went for a good long swim in the municipal pool, which is sadly underused but not sad for me personally. Waters speak words when they’re allowed, and it was a fine fifty, chatty, reassuring lengths of the pool. It also told me that I’m out of shape, but was kind about it.

  I had lunch in one of Syd’s locals and received every ounce of hospitality he surely would have gotten if he were there himself. I received a serving of a spinach and feta cheese pie called spanakopita that was gold-medal gourmet, probably intended to serve a whole family and costing less than I would normally pay for a hot dog. There was a side dish of a grated pickled carrot-beet-parsnip medley that in a stroke overturned my relationship to root vegetables for life.

  And after that I slouched across the street to the public library, where sticky closed windows and summer swelter and chunky old dark gumwood everywhere created the perfect conditions for lazy digestion of foods and words.

  The poetry section, abandoned to me alone. I had to. I scanned quickly for my selections and bundled the team up with me in the fat leather chair that was heroically reproducing the sweat of a century of sensitive word-nerds who had sat there before me.

  It took the
entire afternoon. But I had an entire afternoon to give it.

  I wasn’t wrong. My memory had not convulsed to the point of jolting poetic language entirely out of my ken. The Edgar Allan Poe and Seamus Heaney and Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dylan Thomas that I learned to love in another time were still in there with me when I wanted them. When I called them, when I needed to.

  I could still read the poets without having to become one.

  It was a great and empowering day by any measure.

  But I should have gone to the beach. Because it was a beach day, and beach days should be Kiki days.

  And because if I went to the beach, I would not have bumbled into the library’s media room as I tried to leave.

  “Can just anybody use these?” I asked the librarian dusting the keyboards and screens of the three wide-open computers in the glass-walled, temperature-controlled, bedroom-size space.

  “No,” she said, itching my nose with a smile and a feather duster, “but you can.”

  She left the room then and returned to her quiet, untroubled front desk of summertime.

  Leaving me alone with the computers. I reminded myself that I owned a perfectly wonderful, new and shiny and indestructible laptop that I deliberately left at home, along with my phone, in order to get away for real and for good. No messy ties. No looking backward.

  And that was good, so, well done me. Something to prove, and I proved it.

  Therefore, I had done the hard part and had earned at least a glance at my e-mail.

  I had to admit that as I sat down and called it up, I was feeling like a little kid who had to run away loudly and keep checking over his shoulder to be sure that people noticed and the “please don’t go” pleading could begin.

  I opened my e-mail, and there they were.

  Both of them.