Social Blunders (16 page)

Thirty or so people stood in a rough semicircle around the Prescott living room, blinking in the sudden light and the less sudden knowledge of what they were looking at. A few launched into “Happy Birthday,” but the song petered out before the second line. My first impulse, which I followed, was to dump Katrina on the floor. She may have been the last person present to realize we had a major social blunder on our hands.

The party-goers stared at my hard-on aimed at the ceiling: Cameron was already in an I-told-you-so mode; Billy Gaines had yet to understand the anatomy of the situation; for some bizarre reason, Mimi Saunders broke into hysterical laughter; Sonny showed humiliation; Ryan, rage. Skip Prescott, the bantam rooster himself, appeared deep in denial.

I searched the crowd quickly until I found Gilia, the only one staring at my face instead of my penis. Her eyes reflected immeasurable sadness, a disappointment so total as to annihilate hope. If the goal of my life had been to hurt Gilia, I could never have hurt her more. I wanted to scream, to beg, to sacrifice everything for the right to start over. I wanted to give birth to her. I wanted to marry her.

I said, “Gilia.”

At her name, she blinked, then the mask of withdrawal slipped over her face and she became the same uninvolved, untouchable girl I’d seen the day we met in her mother’s family room.

Skip screeched. “Kill the bastard!”

Sonny made a yelp sound, like a run-over dog, and came at me, followed by the bulk of Ryan.

I ran.

***

The smart move would have been to stand and take my medicine, on the theory Sonny and Ryan wouldn’t kill me in a house full of witnesses. Running off into the dark only upped the chances of manslaughter, but when Skip shouted “
Kill
,” my fight-or-flight instinct kicked in, and I defy you to find a man who will stand and fight when he’s butt naked and everyone else in the room isn’t.

I snagged my boxers off the lawn; there was no time to search for jeans or shoes. I stopped for a moment at Katrina’s car, with the thought of stealing it, but the keys were back in the lock, where Sonny and Ryan were falling over Katrina’s body as they came through the doorway. I couldn’t see well, but she seemed to be grabbing at their legs. I think Sonny kicked her.

Nothing to do but jump in my shorts and run. What I had done to Gilia had to change me—what I did next and how I looked at details. I could not allow less. In the meantime, however, survival mattered. I ran toward the Saunders’ front yard, thinking maybe to circle the house and get on the golf course, where at least running barefoot would be bearable. I’m not one of those guys with tough feet. I put on slippers to use the bathroom at night.

Near the property line, a volleyball net sprang from the dark and I nearly decapitated myself. You know how in an intense physical crisis, time accordions so you can think twenty separate thoughts in the blink of an eye? Falling under the net brought on the eeriest déjà vu deal, which before I even hit the ground I identified as the day in the seventh grade when, chasing a foul ball, I hung myself on a volleyball net and lay on the ground, looking up at Maurey Pierce backlit by the sun. These were her first words to me: “Smooth move, Ex-Lax.”

The perfect comment for my current situation.

This time, no teenage girl waited to insult me, then become my lover and friend. This time, I pulled the collapsed net off, bounced up, and was running again, without missing much more than a stride. The volleyball net reminded me of something else I’d seen last weekend during my visit to the Saunders’ home—Bobby’s Sting-ray bicycle leaning against the porch.

Short frame, fat tires, three speeds, not exactly built for the fast lane, but my entire life—at least since Wanda left—I’d been training for an escape by bicycle. Ryan hurdled the fallen net and ran across the yard. For a giant, he had tremendous quickness, but he’d never catch me when I got up to speed. Linemen can move like bulls on lightning five or ten yards, but a quarter mile kills them.

Right off, I learned a big difference between stationary bike riding and real bike riding—curbs. Street burn. I yanked up the bike, remounted on the run, and took off down a cart path that passed through a fence and onto Starmount Golf Course. If I had to, I could hide in a sand trap or water hazard. Me and the snakes.

Behind me, the fall of footsteps slowed and stopped. I figured Ryan and Sonny had doubled back to the house for instructions. Skip would be out of denial by now and well into vengeance. What could he do? Have me killed? Castrated? I hadn’t broken any laws, that I knew of, so he could hardly swear out a warrant. Something would happen though. Skip Prescott came from the strain of men you couldn’t steal from without consequences. And
stolen possessions
is the term that strain uses to describe another man stuck in their wives.

Even as I pedaled my heart out, Skip wasn’t my major concern. No punishment he extracted would be as awful as what I would give myself for hurting Gilia. Shit. She was the first non-screwed-up woman to like me in a long, long time, and I’d sabotaged us. Lydia and Maurey would say I destroyed her affection on purpose. “You couldn’t handle the responsibility of accepting love so you crapped the gig.” Maybe they were right.

I followed the cart path across the fairway onto the driving range. Golf balls glowed on the wet grass, like a peculiar sort of molecule model. Kids’ bikes are geared so high you have to pump about 120 revolutions a minute to get anywhere, which on a short frame means your knees rush toward your face like pistons. It’s remarkably tiring. Barefoot and in boxer shorts, it would be a long ride home in the rain.

I crossed behind the dry pool, pro shop, and restaurant and had just entered the main parking lot when a car came flying down the street and whipping into the driveway. Ryan’s beefy arm pointed at me from the passenger side. For an instant I was frozen, a deer in headlights, then I jerked the bike into a U-turn-on-a-dime and pedaled like a maniac.

The car came forward much quicker than I moved away. I rode close to the restaurant wall, Sonny jumped the curb and kept straight at me, apparently planning to smash me and Bobby’s bike against the building. I zipped around the kitchen onto a short driveway leading down, away from the club. At the end of the driveway, two Dempsey Dumpsters sat side by side with maybe a two-foot clearance between them.

A two-foot clearance is what a bicycle has that a car hasn’t. Going full pedal, I shot between the Dumpsters and out the other side. From the rear, I heard Sonny’s tires squeal around the corner followed by the spine-tearing sound of stomped brakes and an iron thunderclap when they slammed into the Dumpsters.

From a block away, the jack-o’-lanterns flickered orange like Japanese paper lanterns outlining the shadow of a fairy castle—the Beast’s castle after Beauty taught him how to love and turned him back handsome. It was difficult to convince myself they were real.

I’d been pedaling for several miles, depressed to the core. What had started out fairly simple—meet my fathers—had spun out of control. A week and a half ago I occupied the moral high ground. The men raped my mother and rapists should be held accountable; but instead of holding evil jerks accountable for their sins, I’d run rampant on the innocent families. The wrong people got screwed. Skip would probably divorce Katrina. Gilia had lost her trust, Clark was disillusioned, and the memory that gave Atalanta Williams the courage to go on had been destroyed. And all for what? So I could call a man “Dad”? Genes come from sperm and knowing where the sperm came from doesn’t change who you are. Searching for the source is selfish.

Because I was so absorbed with myself, at first I didn’t realize the apparition down the block was the place I lived. I had the sense of an out-of-proportion birthday cake. Eugene and Shannon had lined every rain gutter and balcony. The ledge around the second floor glittered with orange candles. One of every six or seven lanterns had blown out or burned out, but that still left three hundred glowing pumpkins. It was the most beautiful man- and woman-made thing I’d ever seen.

A knot of people stood in the street, admiring the Manor House. As I rode closer, details became clear on individual pumpkin faces. They’d done the roof in Gilia’s heads with the triangle eyes and diamond noses. Down lower, more visible, Shannon’s surrealistic faces gave an unsettling gargoyle look to the house. I searched for my van Gogh, but couldn’t see him.

A woman in the crowd said, “What’s he doing?”

“I think it’s a costume,” a man said. “Part of the show.”

Up till then I’d been so focused on jack-o’-lanterns I hadn’t noticed the figure on the porch. Dressed in black, he seemed to be filling a bucket with water from a hose. As I watched, he put on a black glove and unscrewed the bulb from the porch light, then he pulled off the glove and put it in his jacket pocket.

I said, “Clark, you idiot.”

The woman who’d spoken first said, “You know that boy? Is he part of the show?”

I dropped Bobby’s bicycle on the grass and walked across the yard toward Clark and the house. Behind me, someone said, “That’s not a costume, it’s underwear.”

Clark peered across the lawn. “Don’t come any closer, Mr. Callahan.” Since last night’s botch job, he’d done some homework. An orange extension cord ran from the plug under the light socket to the bucket, where he’d stripped the last six inches of wire and wrapped it around the handle.

“Clark, what in hell are you doing this time?”

His forehead rippled. “You laughed at me. You said only an idiot tries to kill himself with electricity.”

“I meant breathing fumes from an electric motor.”

“No one takes me seriously.”

“I take you seriously, Clark. So does your father.”

“No, you don’t. You all think I’m a clown.”

“You don’t have to die to prove your emotions are real.”

He balanced a foot on the bucket. “The world is an awful place, Mr. Callahan. I’ll never fit in here.”

Clark stuck his foot in the water and his finger in the light socket.

***

I rammed him as hard as I could with my shoulder. The momentum broke Clark free from the charge but not before I caught a stiff zap. I landed on my left side on the concrete porch and slid into a column. When I looked back, Clark lay on his face in the spreading water from the dumped bucket.

Clark was dead weight as I rolled him over on his back. His face had gone slack and gray. Both eyes were nearly closed, but not quite—twin egg-white slits showed in the folds. I felt his neck for a pulse but couldn’t find one, so I doubled up my fist and belted him in the chest. The body didn’t jerk or anything, was like hitting a sack of potatoes. I put my ear to his heart and held my own breath, listening. Nothing.

From the street someone called, “Is he all right?”

I grabbed hair and pulled Clark’s head back like they teach you in the artificial respiration films in high school. In the films, the victim’s mouth falls open and the savior goes to work, but in my case, Clark’s jaw locked. First I tried prying it open with my thumb, then I slapped him hard. No good.

I jumped off the porch and ran to the garage for a screwdriver. All the way across the yard, I rehearsed what my life would be like if I let him die. My life, Billy’s life, Clark’s mother, who must have been at the Prescott party too—losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to anyone, and being the cause of someone losing a child may be second.

Back at Clark’s body I jammed the screwdriver between his molars and twisted. I may have broken his teeth, I don’t know, but somehow I got him open. Some of the people from the street had come into the yard, but no one offered to help. I didn’t expect them to. Clark was my responsibility.

The door opened and Shannon appeared in the light, still wearing her grass skirt and leis.

I said, “Call an ambulance.”

She disappeared without a word. I pulled Clark’s head way back until he almost faced the wall, then, holding his tongue down with the screwdriver, I took a deep breath and put my mouth against his.

My lips on another man’s. You can be repulsed at the thought of something all your life and then not even think about it when the time comes to act. A minute ago touching a man on the face was the least likely thing I would ever do.

A shadow crossed the rectangle of light and Eugene knelt beside me. He was dressed in a gorilla costume with no head.

“Who is it?” he asked.

Clark’s chest rose when I blew into him, but when I stopped, so did he. “Clark Gaines. Billy’s boy.”

“Why isn’t he breathing?”

“Electrocuted himself.”

I don’t know if the information meant anything to Eugene or not. He probably didn’t remember the name Billy Gaines, and if he did, I doubt if he connected his attempt at finding me something to do with this body on the porch.

Eugene used his teeth to pull off his gorilla paws. “Move up closer to the head,” he said. He put his palms on Clark’s chest and pumped. I went into a three exhalations, then listen pattern. Clark’s lungs would work one or two breaths, then stop again. He wasn’t dead, but he couldn’t stay alive on his own.

Shannon reappeared with jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of sneakers. “You’ll need them in the ambulance,” she said.

“Call Billy Gaines and tell him to meet us at the hospital. Moses Cone is closest, so I guess that’s where they’ll take him.”

“Okay.”

“Billy was at Skip Prescott’s a half hour ago. He might still be there.”

Shannon started to ask a question, but didn’t. She moved to go inside, then turned back to me again. “He’ll want to know what happened; what do I tell him?”

I had no answer.

The ambulance attendants stuck paddles onto Clark’s chest and jolted him with a battery and got him going, then at the hospital he stopped again in the emergency room. I watched him start and stop until a nurse spotted me in the corner and chased me into the waiting room.

Billy, Skip, Cameron, and a woman I didn’t know sat on pastel chairs like you see in institutional cafeterias. The waiting room walls were legal pad yellow and the tube lighting buzzed.
Hart to Hart
played on an elevated TV with a bad picture and no sound. Robert Wagner wore a tuxedo while Stephanie Powers pounded out her next best-seller.

Skip glared at me in blatant hatred, but Billy came over and shook my hand and thanked me for bringing Clark in. He introduced me to his wife, Daphne.

“I don’t understand why Clark was at your house,” she said.

Billy and I stared at the tile floor. He was still in shock at having a son who’d attempted suicide. He hadn’t gotten around to blame yet.

Skip had. And Cameron. My fathers had hated me from the start and now they hated me with good reason, which made them more confident in their hatred. Cameron still wore the three-piece suit he’d been in when he came to threaten me earlier in the day. Skip had on the tennis shorts uniform. It was hard to see anything the two had in common besides Skip’s sister and my mother.

Hart to Hart
ended and the news came on and went off while we sat in silence. Every now and then an orderly or a nurse came through and everyone looked up expectantly. The nurses were professional at ignoring people in the waiting room. Billy cleaned his glasses. Twice he asked Daphne if she wanted a Coca-Cola and both times she said “No.” Skip smoked a cigarette.

I thought about how I would feel if Shannon killed herself. That’s what fiction writers do—see someone in trouble and try to feel what they feel. If Shannon committed suicide, I couldn’t conceive of ever recovering. People do live through it, but I don’t know how. Maybe they have no choice.

I watched the side of Billy’s face as he blinked, his attention on Daphne. His face wasn’t sneaky or complicated; it accepted, like an animal. Innocent. I got in a fight once to stop a kid from killing kittens, but what I’d done to Billy was so much worse than killing kittens. All that pride I took in knowing right from wrong and refusing to do wrong had turned out nothing but hooey. Accidental cruelty is just as evil as doing it on purpose.

***

The emergency room doctor was Egyptian, I think. He looked Egyptian and wore a name tag that said
Dr. Faroub
. He walked with that straight-up way you never see in Americans.

He came toward me, fingering the stethoscope in his jacket pocket. “Your son, he will live.”

My stomach unclenched. “Not my son. His.”

Dr. Faroub turned to Billy. “The boy suffered a grand mal seizure, which brought on heart failure. He should lose weight and receive counseling. Counseling is a help for the children.”

Billy shook the doctor’s hand. “Thank you for saving him.”

“Suicide is illegal, you know.”

“How can you tell he did it on purpose?” Daphne asked, which might have been a meaningless question if anyone but Clark had stepped in a wired bucket of water and stuck their finger in a light socket.

Dr. Faroub looked from Daphne to Billy. “The boy had a note in his pocket saying he wanted his body going to the Duke Medical School…so his father couldn’t touch him.”

Daphne raised her hand to her cheek. Of all my extended family members, she was the one who’d been left in the dark. “Clark idolizes his father,” she said.

Dr. Faroub shrugged and repeated, “Counseling is a help for the children. Will you proceed to the front, there are forms.”

“I already gave them my insurance card,” Daphne said.

“There are always more forms.”

After the doctor clicked away, Billy’s legs kind of went out from under him and he sat down quickly.

“It’s my fault,” he said.

Cameron looked at me. “No, it isn’t.”

“Why would Clark be mad at you, William?” Daphne asked.

Cameron stood up. “The doctor said something about forms, Daphne. Don’t you think you should take care of that?”

Daphne’s eyes traveled from Cameron to Billy to me, where they stayed a long time. The woman may have been dressed by Wal-Mart, but she wasn’t stupid. She knew a story lay beneath the facts, only she was Southern enough not to demand explanations in public.

“Okay,” she said. “Billy, you want a Coke?”

He shook his head, no.

***

I don’t know if they’d been waiting for word on Clark or for Daphne to leave the room, but as soon as she left, Skip and Cameron turned nasty.

“I hope you’re happy,” Skip said.

Women use that sentence when they’re pissed. Generally, men only say it when they mean it.

“Why should I be happy?” I said.

Cameron turned sideways, away from me. He seemed to be addressing the television. “You wanted to place our lives in upheaval and now you have. Your goals are met, but I promise you, the price will be heavy.”

“I never wanted to place your lives in upheaval.”

“Then why seduce Skip’s wife? Why drive Billy’s son to suicide? There can be no motivation other than harming us.”

“Skip’s wife seduced me.”

Skip doubled his fists and took a step toward me. “Katrina told us how you got her stinking drunk and had your way with her, then you blackmailed her into an affair.”

“She made me eat her in the sauna.”

Cameron turned to stare in my direction. “Your relationship with Gilia stops now.”

“I’m afraid so,” I said.

Billy suddenly let out a sob. “Why does Clark hate me?”

“Simple,” Cameron said. “This…person turned him against you.”

“I hope you’re happy,” Skip said. The evening had cut off his ability to vocalize bile.

I felt terrible about Clark and Gilia and everyone else who suffered because of my existence, but these men were persecuting me for events they had set in motion.

I said, “I’m not the only one to blame. None of this would have happened if you hadn’t raped Lydia in the first place.”

There was silence, then Billy said, “Raped?”

“Why can’t any of you take responsibility for your actions? I’m nothing but the product of this crime, you’re the cause.”

“Nobody raped your mother,” Cameron said.

“She was a slut,” Skip said.

“Bullshit. You got her drunk on vodka shot into oranges with a hypodermic needle, then the five of you raped her over and over and when you were done you stood in a circle and urinated on her body.”

Billy’s face was twisted in pain. His voice came in a choke. “That’s a lie.”

“My mother wouldn’t lie about something so important.” A Whitewater roar started in my ears. My mouth tasted of tin.

“Your mother was a slut,” Skip repeated.

“Babe Carnisek admitted you all raped her.”

Had he? I couldn’t remember if the word rape was used or not. Cameron was watching me like an owl on a mouse. When he spoke, his voice was deliberate. “Your mother gave us each some fudge and a tumbler of her daddy’s scotch. After we drank, she offered us two dollars apiece to have sex with her.”

“No.”

“We were sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys. What did you expect us to do?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“We were all virgins,” Billy said.

Skip said, “I wasn’t.”

Billy went on. “We were all virgins and scared to death, but she insisted. I was so frightened I couldn’t get erect. She called me a ‘worm’ and made me give back the two dollars.”

This didn’t make sense. All the relationships of my life had been shaped by Lydia’s rape. “Why didn’t you tell me that when I came to your house?”

Billy looked down at his hands. “I couldn’t admit I’m a worm.”

“Your mother was a slut,” Skip said for the third time.

“Face it,” Cameron said. “You’ve been had.”

“I need to use the telephone.”

***

Didi answered on the eighth ring.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Is Babe home?”

“Whenever the phone rings at midnight, somebody’s died.”

“No one died, Mrs. Carnisek. This is Sam Callahan, I need to ask Babe a question.”

“He goes to sleep after the weather and sports.”

“Could you wake him up? It’s important.”

The phone was silent a long time. A short black man in a white uniform came down the hall, sliding a floor buffer from side to side in rhythm to music only he could hear over a pair of earphones. He was smoking a cigarette, but instead of using the sand ashtrays at either end of the hall, he let the ash get long until it fell from its own weight and was swept under the floor buffer. I concentrated on breathing.

“What?”

“I’m sorry to wake you, Babe, but I have to know what happened on Christmas Eve 1949.”

“Who is this?”

“Sam Callahan. I was at your house the Saturday before last during the Washington-Detroit game. You might be my father.”

“I remember.”

“I need to know what happened the night I was conceived.”

He hesitated a moment, then said, “A bunch of us screwed your mother.”

“I was hoping for details.”

“Let me think.” The black guy came close to the pay phone and I put a finger in my ear to cover the
whish
of his buffer.

“I was at Skip Prescott’s house listening to colored music on the record player,” Babe said, “and a friend of his sister telephoned and asked us to a party.”

“Yes.”

“Your mom was mad at her daddy about something, so she screwed us.”

I inhaled deeply. “Whose idea was it?”

“Was what?”

“Having sex. The five of you having sex with Lydia.”

“Hell, we were such young punks none of us even knew what hole to go in.”

“So the sex was her idea?”

“She paid us money to do her.”

Everything that had happened in my life up to that point suddenly became void. I closed my eyes to block the nausea and leaned my head against the wall next to the phone.

Babe’s voice was hesitant. “After you left the other day, I got to thinking, and I don’t believe I was quite honest while you were here.”

“You lied?”

“Didn’t lie so much as forgot the whole truth. You can ask Didi, that’s not like me.”

“What’s the truth?”

“I’m probably not your father after all.”

I didn’t say anything. I was beyond the ability to react.

“The truth is I squirted so quick I don’t think I ever got far enough in to make her pregnant.”

“Oh.”

“She cussed me out for messing on her belly.”

***

I walked all night. It must have been raining, but I don’t remember. I don’t remember feeling anything, inside or out. The police stopped me down by the interstate. I must have answered enough questions not to be taken in as a drunk, but I don’t see how.

Dawn found me lying on Atalanta Williams’ couch with my head in her lap, sobbing. Fingers ran through my hair. Her other hand rested on my shoulder.

She said, “I knew all along my Jake couldn’t have done what your mama said.”

Her bathrobe smelled like flowers. I could easily have stayed on that couch for years. Another day at home—waking up, looking out at the weather, deciding what to wear—was more than I could face. Going on was too much responsibility.

“I wish you were my mother,” I said.

Atalanta gave me a squeeze on the shoulder and said, “So do I.”