Birds of America (19 page)

A different story? “I don’t like stories,” said Mack. “I like food. I like car keys.” He paused. “I like pretzels.”

“Okaaaay,” said Quilty, tracing the outline of his own shoulder and then Mack’s.

“You do this a lot, don’t you?” asked Mack.

“Do what? Upgrade in the handyman department?”

“Bring into your bed some big straight guy you think’s a little dumb.”

“I never do that. Never have.” He cocked his head to one side. “Before.” With his flat almond-shaped fingertips, he played Mack’s arm like a keyboard. “Never before. You are my big sexual experiment.”

“But you see, you’re
my
big sexual experiment,” insisted Mack. In his life before Quilty, he could never have imagined being in bed with a skinny naked guy wearing sunglasses. “So how can that be?”

“Honey, it
bes
.”

“But someone’s got to be in charge. How can both of us survive on some big experimental adventure? Someone’s got to be steering the ship.”

“Oh, the ship be damned. We’ll be fine. We are in this
thing together. It’s luck. It’s God’s will. It’s synchronicity! Serendipity! Kismet! Camelot! Annie, honey, Get Your Fucking Gun!” Quilty was squealing.

“My ex-wife’s name is Annie,” said Mack.

“I know, I know. That’s why I said it,” said Quilty, trying now not to sigh. “Think of it this way: the blind leading the straight. It can work. It’s not impossible.”

In the mornings, the phone rang too much, and it sometimes annoyed Mack. Where were the pretzels and the car keys when you really needed them? He could see that Quilty knew the exact arm’s distance to the receiver, picking it up in one swift pluck. “Are you
sans
or
avec
?” Quilty’s friends would ask. They spoke loudly and theatrically—as if to a deaf person—and Mack could always hear.

“Avec,”
Quilty would say.

“Oooooh,” they would coo. “And how
is
Mr. Avec today?”

“You should move your stuff in here,” Quilty finally said to Mack one night.

“Is that what you want?” Mack found himself deferring in ways that were unfamiliar to him. He had never slept with a man before, that was probably it—though years ago there had been those nights when Annie’d put on so much makeup and leather, her gender seemed up for grabs: it had been oddly attractive to Mack, self-sufficient; it hadn’t required him and so he’d wanted to get close, to get next to it, to learn it, make it need him, take it away, make it die. Those had been strange, bold nights, a starkness between them that was more like an ancient bone-deep brawl than a marriage. But ultimately, it all remained unreadable for him, though reading, he felt, was not a natural thing and should not be done to people. In general, people were not road maps. People were not hieroglyphs or books. They were not stories. A person was a collection of accidents. A person was an infinite pile of rocks with things growing underneath. In general, when you felt a longing for love, you took a woman and possessed her gingerly and not too hopefully
until you finally let go, slept, woke up, and she eluded you once more. Then you started over. Or not.

Nothing about Quilty, however, seemed elusive.

“Is that what I want? Of course it’s what I want. Aren’t I a walking pamphlet for desire?” asked Quilty. “In Braille, of course, but still. Check it out. Move in. Take me.”

“Okay,” said Mack.

Mack had had a child with Annie, their boy, Lou, and just before the end, Mack had tried to think up words to say to Annie, to salvage things. He’d said “okay” a lot. He did not know how to raise a child, a toothless, trickless child, but he knew he had to protect it from the world a little; you could not just hand it over and let the world go at it. “There’s something that with time grows between people,” he said once, in an attempt to keep them together, keep Lou. If he lost Lou, he believed, it would wreck his life completely. “Something that grows whether you like it or not.”

“Gunk,” Annie said.

“What?”

“Gunk!” she shouted. “Gunk grows between people!”

He slammed the door, went drinking with his friends. The bar they all went to—Teem’s Pub—quickly grew smoky and dull. Someone, Bob Bacon, maybe, suggested going to Visions and Sights, a strip joint out near the interstate. But Mack was already missing his wife. “Why would I want to go to a place like that,” Mack said loudly to his friends, “when I’ve got a beautiful wife at home?”

“Well, then,” Bob said, “let’s go to
your
house.”

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

And when they got there, Annie was already gone. She had packed fast, taken Lou, and fled.

Now it is two and a half years since Annie left, and here Mack is with Quilty, traveling: their plan is to head through Chicago
and St. Louis and then south along the Mississippi. They will check into bed-and-breakfasts, tour the historic sights, like spouses. They have decided on this trip now in October in part because Mack is recuperating from a small procedure. He has had a small benign cyst razored from “an intimate place.”

“The bathroom?” asked Quilty that first day after the surgery, and reached to feel Mack’s thick black stitches, then sighed. “What’s the unsexiest thing we can do for the next two weeks?”

“Go on a trip,” Mack suggested.

Quilty hummed contentedly. He found the insides of Mack’s wrists, where the veins were stiff cords, and caressed them with his thumbs. “Married men are always the best,” he said. “They’re so grateful and butch.”

“Give me a break,” said Mack.

The next day, they bought quart bottles of mineral water and packets of saltines, and drove out of town, out the speedway, with the Resurrection Park cemetery on one side and the Sunset Memories Park cemetery on the other—a route the cabbies called “the Bone Zone.” When he’d first arrived in Tapston, Mack drove a cab for a week, and he’d gotten to know the layout of the town fast. “I’m in the Bone Zone,” he used to have to say into the radio mouthpiece. “I’m in the Bone Zone.” But he’d hated that damn phrase and hated waiting at the airport, all the lousy tips and heavy suitcases. And the names of things in Tapston—apartment buildings called Crestview Manor, treeless subdivisions called Arbor Valley, the cemeteries undisguised as Sunset Memories and Resurrection Park—all gave him the creeps.
Resurrection Park!
Jesus Christ. Every damn Hoosier twisted words right to death.

But cruising out the Bone Zone for a road trip in Quilty’s car jazzed them both. They could once again escape all the unfortunateness of this town and its alarming resting places. “Farewell, you ole stiffs,” Mack said.

“Good-bye, all my clients,” cried Quilty when they passed
the county jail. “Good-bye, good-bye!” Then he sank back blissfully in his seat as Mack sped the car toward the interstate, out into farm country, silver-topped silos gleaming like spaceships, the air grassy and thick with hog.

“I’d like to make a reservation for a double room, if possible,” Mack now shouts over the noise of the interstate traffic. He looks and sees Quilty getting out of the car, leaving Guapo, feeling and tapping his way with his cane, toward the entrance to McDonald’s.

“Yes, a double room,” says Mack. He looks over his shoulder, keeping an eye on Quilty. “American Express? Yes.” He fumbles through Quilty’s wallet, reads the number out loud. He turns again and sees Quilty ordering a soda but not finding his wallet, since he’d given it to Mack for the call. Mack sees Quilty tuck his cane under his arm and pat all his pockets, finding nothing there but a red Howe Caverns handker-chief.

“You want the number on the card? Three one one two …”

Quilty now turns to leave, without a soda, and heads for the door. But he chooses the wrong door. He wanders into the Playland by mistake, and Mack can see him thrashing around with his cane amid the plastic cheeseburgers and the french fry swings, lit up at night for the kids. There is no exit from the Playland except back through the restaurant, but Quilty obviously doesn’t know this and first taps, then bangs his cane against the forest of garish obstacles.

“… eight one zero zero six,” repeats the reservations clerk on the phone.

By the time Mack can get to him, Quilty is collapsed on a ceramic chicken breast. “Good night, Louise. I thought you’d left me,” Quilty says. “I swear, from here on in, I’ll do whatever you want. I’ve glimpsed the abyss, and, by God, it’s full of big treacherous pieces of patio furniture.”

“We’ve got a room,” says Mack.

“Fantastic. Can we also get a soda?” Mack lets Quilty take his elbow and then walks Quilty back inside, where they order
Pepsis and a single apple pie the size of an eyeglass pouch—to split in the car, like children.

“Have a nice day,” says the boy at the counter.

“Thanks for the advice,” says Quilty.

They have brought along the game Trivial Pursuit, and at night Quilty likes to play. Though Mack complies—if that’s what you want to do, fine—he thinks it’s a dumb game. If you don’t know the answer, you feel stupid. And if you do know the answer, you feel just as stupid.
More
stupid. What are you doing with that stupid bit of information in your brain? Mack would prefer to lie in the room and stare at the ceiling, thinking about Chicago, thinking about their day. “Name four American state capitals named after presidents,” he reads sleepily from a card. He would rather try to understand the paintings he has seen that afternoon, and has almost understood: the Halloween hues of the Lautrecs; the chalky ones of Puvis de Chavannes; the sweet finger paints of the Vuillards and Bonnards, all crowded with window light and commodes. Mack had listened to the buzzing voice coming from Quilty’s headphones, but he hadn’t gotten his own headphones. Let a blind man be described to! Mack had his own eyes. But finally, overwhelmed by poor Quilty’s inability either to see or touch the paintings, he had led Quilty downstairs to the statuary, and when no one was looking, he’d placed Quilty’s hands upon the naked marble figure of a woman. “Ah,” Quilty had said, feeling the nose and lips, and then he grew quiet and respectful at her shoulders, at her breasts, and hips, and when he got down past the thighs and knees to her feet, Quilty laughed out loud. Feet! These he knew best. These he liked.

Afterward, they went to a club to hear a skit called “Kuwait Until Dark.”

“Lincoln, Jackson, Madison, Jefferson City,” says Quilty.
“Do you think we will have a war?” He seems to have grown impatient with the game. “You were in the service once. Do you think this is it? The big George Bush showdown?”

“Nah,” says Mack. He had been in the army only during peacetime. He’d been stationed in Texas, then in Germany. He’d been with Annie: those were good years. Only a little crying. Only a little drinking. Later, he’d been in the reserves, but the reserves were never called up—everyone knew that. Until now. “Probably it’s just a sales demo for the weapons.”

“Well, they’ll go off, then,” says Quilty. “Won’t they? If it’s a demonstration, things will be demonstrated.”

Mack picks another card. “In the song ‘They Call the Wind Maria,’ what do they call the rain?”

“It’s Mar-eye-a, not Maria,” says Quilty.

“It’s Mar-eye-a?” asks Mack. “Really?”

“Really,” says Quilty. There is something wicked and scolding that comes over Quilty’s face in this game. “It’s your turn.” He thrusts out his hand. “Now give me the card so you don’t cheat.”

Mack hands him the card. “Mar-eye-a,” says Mack. The song is almost coming back to him—he recalls it from somewhere. Maybe Annie used to sing it. “They call the wind Mar-eye-a. They call the rain … Okay. I think it’s coming. …” He presses his fingers to his temples, squinting and thinking. “They call the wind Mar-eye-ah. They call the rain … Okay. Don’t tell me. They call the rain … Pariah!”

“Pariah?”
Quilty guffaws.

“Okay, then,” says Mack, exasperated. “Heavy. They call the rain Heavy Rain.” He reaches aggressively for his minibar juice. Next time, he’s just going to look quickly at the back of the card.

“Don’t you want to know the right answer?”

“No.”

“Okay, I’ll just go on to the next card.” He picks one up,
pretending to read. “It says here, ‘Darling, is there life on Mars? Yes or no.’ ”

Mack has gone back to thinking about the paintings. “I say no,” he says absently.

“Hmmm,” says Quilty, putting the card down. “I think the answer is yes. Look at it this way: they’re sure there are ice crystals. And where there is ice, there is water. And where there is water, there is waterfront property. And where there is waterfront property, there are Jews!” He claps his hands and sinks back onto the acrylic quilting of the bedspread. “Where are you?” he asks finally, waving his arms out in the air.

“I’m here,” says Mack. “I’m right here.” But he doesn’t move.

“You’re here? Well, good. At least you’re not at my cousin Esther’s Martian lake house with her appalling husband, Howard. Though sometimes I wonder how they’re doing. How are they? They never come to visit. I frighten them so much.” He pauses. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Okay.”

“What do I look like?”

Mack hesitates. “Brown eyes, brown eyebrows, and brown hair.”

“That’s it?”

“Okay. Brown teeth, too.”

“Really!”

“Sorry,” says Mack. “I’m a little tired.”

Hannibal is like all the river towns that have tried recently to spruce themselves up, make antique shops and bed-and-breakfasts from the shoreline mansions. It saddens Mack. There is still a despondent grandeur to these houses, but it radiates out, in a kind of shrug, onto a drab economy of tidbit tourism and health-care facilities. A hundred years of flight and rehab lie on the place like rain. Heavy rain! The few barges that still
push this far upriver seem quaint and ridiculous. But Quilty wants to hear what all the signs say—the Mark Twain Diner, the Tom ’n Huck Motel; it amuses him. They take the tour of Sam Clemens’s houses, of Mr. Clemens’s office, of the little jail. They get on a tiny train Quilty calls “Too, Too Twain,” which tours the area and makes the place seem even more spritely and hopeless. Quilty feels along the wide boards of the whitewashed fence. “This is modern paint,” he says.