Going Nowhere Fast (3 page)

"How's that?" Big Joe demanded.

Dog shrugged. "I saw a letter."

"What kind of letter? And stop dropping those cookie crumbs all over the carpet!"

"It was just a letter. Addressed to you. I don't know what was in it." He started brushing the crumbs he'd littered the floor with in all directions, as if by dispersing them throughout the room he could make them disappear.

"Where did you see this letter, Theodore?" I asked him, tired of listening to him dance around his father's questions like a mob boss facing a grand jury.

He looked at me, his eyes wide and helpless. He knew the truth was about to emerge from his lips, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Sometimes, motherhood makes you feel like you've got every man on the planet by the short hairs. It's great.

"At Mo's," Bad Dog said.

"At Mo's?"

"Yes ma'am." He nodded to make sure I believed him.

Mo is what we all call Maureen, Dog's oldest sister. Mo is a tax attorney who lives in La Jolla, California, a USC grad and mother of two, and she takes care of all Joe's and my business affairs. Our bank accounts, our travel reservations, our medical bills—Mo handles everything, and under the strictest code of silence. No one knows our itinerary but her. No one else needs to know. (If I haven't yet made this abundantly clear, all our other children are pains in the derriere, for a vast assortment of depressing reasons, and when Joe and I left California, we didn't exactly leave them behind by accident.)

"What were you doing at Mo's?" Big Joe asked.

"I wasn't doin' nothin'. Just sayin' hello."

"Uh-huh."

"I can't go visit my sister if I want?"

"No. You wanna talk to your sister, make a phone call. Or write her a letter. Anything you have to say to her in person can wait until Christmas."

"Joe—" I said.

"Joe nothing. Only reason this boy went out to La Jolla was to find out where we were. You know it, and I know it. And if I have to tell you why, Dottie, you haven't been paying attention."

"I don't need any money," Bad Dog said, insulted.

"Boy, don't give me that. You
always
need money."

"Okay, so I could use a few dollars. But that ain't the only reason I wanted to see you."

"So what's the other reason?" I asked him, no doubt taking the words right out of his father's mouth.

"Wait a minute, Dottie," Big Joe said. "I wanna hear what he means by 'a few dollars,' first."

"Moms, it's like this," Dog said, deciding to ignore his father's presence in the room altogether. "All I need is a thousand dollars and a ride to Pittsburgh."

"
Pittsburgh?
" I cried.

"
A thousand dollars?
" Big Joe howled.

"What? You can't handle that? A thousand measly bucks and a little detour along your way?"

I leapt to my feet to block my husband's charge, stopping him before he could get up a head of steam, and said, "Joe, if we kill the child now, we'll never find out what he's talking about."

"I don't care what he's talking about. Whatever it is, it's gonna cost me a thousand dollars, and that's all I need to know about it!"

"Theodore," I said, turning to face Bad Dog again, but keeping myself between him and his father, "what in heaven's name is in
Pittsburgh?
"

"A job, Moms," he said. "
The
job. The one I've been waitin' for all my life."

So that was why he'd been refusing work all these year. He'd been waiting for
the
job.

"What kind of job?"

"You ain't never gonna believe it," he said.

"That much we know," Big Joe said.

Ignoring him, Dog pointed to the familiar logo on his dingy T-shirt and said, "I'm gonna work for the Raiders. I got me a job with the Silver and Black!"

"What?"

The Los Angeles Raiders are, to the best of my knowledge, a professional football team, and they have always been Joe's favorite. (Why men even claim to have a "favorite" football team, I'll never understand, because they'll watch any two teams play a game to the final gun no matter how little they care for either one. It's the game men are addicted to, sisters, not just a franchise or two, so don't let the warm-up jackets and bumper stickers fool you. Your man may profess to be a Seahawks fan, but he's going to watch the oh-and-fifteen Bengals play the one-and-fourteen Bills under six feet of snow on the last day of the season, no matter what else you had planned for him.)

"The Raiders?" Big Joe asked skeptically.

"That's right. The Silver and Black Attack! Commitment to Excellence, and all that!"

"Boy, you're crazy! What kind of job would the Raiders give you? 'Special Assistant in Charge of Dehydration'?"

"Huh?"

"I think your father means a water boy, Theodore," I said.

"Water boy? Hell no, I ain't gonna be no water boy!"

"What are you going to do, then? Let me hear a job description," Big Joe demanded.

"You ever heard of a trainer? I'm gonna be an assistant trainer! You know, one of those guys helps tape the fellas up before games, an' rubs 'em down after practice—stuff like that."

"Jeez Looweez," Big Joe said.

''I'm tellin' you, it's true. I swear it!"

"Boy, get off it. You aren't no assistant trainer. And anybody dumb enough to mistake you for one is too stupid to work for the Raiders."

"You don't understand. They're gonna
train
me, Pops. They're gonna
teach
me how to be a trainer."

"Who? Who's gonna teach you?"

"Cubby. Cubby Denkins. He's the head trainer for the Raiders, he's the one offered me the job."

"Cubby Denkins?" From the way Joe said the name, I could tell it was familiar to him. "Where would Cubby Denkins know you from?"

"I met him at this club, back in L.A. The Final Score. Him and a couple of the boys on the team came in one night a few months ago and we hit it off. You know, had a few drinks, talked a little 'ball. Next thing I know, he's offerin' me a job. An 'apprenticeship,' he called it. All I gotta do is pay for my materials, an' he'd do the rest, he said."

"And these 'materials.' They're what you need a thousand dollars for?" I asked him.

"That's right."

"A
thousand dollars
, Theodore?"

"Yes ma'am." He was staring down into the Oreo bag, his head practically inside of it, ostensibly looking for a whole, unbroken cookie. I was going to ask him to look me in the eye and answer the question again, but his father spoke up before I got the chance.

"Hell, Dottie, what kind of 'materials' cost that kind of money? The team
bus
doesn't cost a thousand dollars!"

"It ain't
what
I gotta buy, Pops. It's
how
much
I gotta buy. Like a hundred rolls of tape, three electronic stopwatches, twenty-five clipboards, two starter guns… It all adds up, man."

"So why do
you
have to buy it? Can't the Raiders supply you with all that crap?"

"Sure they could. 'Cept I'm not really gonna be workin' for the Raiders. Not at first, anyway. I'm gonna be workin' for Cubby. I'm gonna be his apprentice, like I told you."

"Yeah? So what?"

"So he's not gonna give me the job permanently—or pay any of my expenses—till he's satisfied I'm gonna work out. 'Cause the last apprentice he had, see, the guy ran out on him, an' took a ton of stuff with 'im when he left. Cubby had to reimburse the team out of his own pocket."

Big Joe just looked at me and shook his head, not buying a word of Dog's story.

"What does all this have to do with Pittsburgh?" I asked our son.

"That's where the Raiders are, Pittsburgh. They're playin' the Steelers there this Sunday."

"And this couldn't have waited until they got back home?"

"No ma'am. It couldn't. After Pittsburgh, they go to Cleveland, and Cubby said he needs somebody right away. He wanted me to join the team 'fore they left Los Angeles, but I didn't have the money then."

"And you still don't," his father said flatly.

"What about the gun, Theodore? What are you doing with a gun?"

"Well, it's like this, Moms. I didn't really know it was a gun when I bought it. You know what I'm sayin'?"

"No," I said.

"Hell no," Big Joe said.

"Well, I needed a couple of starter guns, remember? You know, the kind of gun they use to start races at track meets? So I tried to buy one. On the street. Only, the lyin' chump I bought it from—"

"Sold you a real gun instead," I said.

Bad Dog nodded and blushed, embarrassed by his alleged naïveté.

"Okay. I've heard enough," Big Joe said to me. "How about you? You heard enough?"

"Joe—"

"I say we buy him a ticket on the next Greyhound to California and let it go at that. What do you say?"

"I say we should give the boy a chance to prove his story before we do anything rash," I said.

"You want me to give him a chance? Fine. Here's what we'll do." Before I could stop him, he pushed past me to snatch Dog up off the floor by the nape of his neck. "I'm going to write a check for a thousand dollars and throw the both of 'em into the Canyon out there. If Junior hits the bottom before the check does, he can
have
it. Is that fair?"

"Joe, let the child go," I said quietly.

"Moms! He's not playin'!" Bad Dog gurgled, forced up on his tippy-toes by the huge, iron-like hand around his throat.

"Joe, that's enough," I said. "You're scaring him."

Joe turned, keeping his grip on Dog, and said, "He's crazy, Dottie. A lunatic. We've been talking to him now for a whole day, and he hasn't made a lick of sense yet!"

"Of course he hasn't. This one never does. This is our baby, Joe. Theodore. Remember Theodore?"

He couldn't help but remember, eventually. Over the years, he and I had come to attach a specific profile to each of our five children, and we both knew them all by heart: Edward had always been the paranoid one, Delila the most impulsive; Walter was insensitive, and Mo was smart.

And Theodore, God bless him, was
slow
.

Only Snow White ever shared a home with a more diverse band of little numbskulls.

"Besides," I went on, "we
all
have to stay at the park until they tell us otherwise. You know that."

"But, Dottie—"

"Baby, it's only for a few days, all right? Not even a week. We can stand to be around the boy for that long, can't we?"

Big Joe looked at his son and considered the question. It was like asking a Shiite Muslim if it wouldn't be too much trouble to share his toothbrush with a Christian for a day or two.

But he let Bad Dog go.

At last. A "baby" that worked.

3

Early the next morning, Big Joe and I went for our daily run, moving it up by several hours from the day before in the hope that an earlier starting time might change our luck a little, and this time, I checked to see that the door to our hotel cabin had locked behind us. Joe made a point of watching me do it, just as I thought he would, and mumbled something about the horse having already left the barn. I wanted to slap him silly, but I didn't; I knew I had his mistrust coming. After all, if I'd only locked Lucille's door the afternoon before…

Bad Dog wanted to stay in the room and sleep in until our return, but his father wouldn't have it.

"Get the hell out of that bed and go find something to do," Joe told him.

"Why? Why can't I just stay here?" Dog whined.

Joe crossed his arms and puffed up his chest. "Number one, because I don't want to find any more dead folks using my bathroom. And number two, because I said so. That's why."

"Man, that's cold."

"No it's not. Telling you to get out and stay out, that would be cold. Or begging you to get out of my life and never come back,
that
would be cold. Or asking you to leave this room—"

"All right, all right. I get the idea." Bad Dog rolled reluctantly out of bed and onto his feet, yawning. He reached down into the waistband of his shorts to scratch himself absently, looking me straight in the eye, then smiled and said, "Mornin', Moms."

My son, the gentleman's gentleman.

Outside, the sky was a perfect, milky blue at eight in the morning, marred only by a slow parade of cumulus clouds as white and wispy as stretched cotton balls. On the earth below, meanwhile, tourists of all nationalities streamed about the national park grounds like bees in a giant hive, either following the established trails or blazing new ones of their own, lugging infants and diaper bags, backpacks and lunch boxes—and cameras. Hundreds upon hundreds of cameras, all humming and clicking incessantly, and all focused upon a common target: the Grand Canyon. The great colossal void in the arid Arizona earth that stretched for miles in all directions, its jagged, burnt-orange walls carved and sculpted by time into cliffs and columns of every conceivable shape and size. Two hundred and seventeen miles long, the brochures said it was, and in some places as much as eighteen miles wide and 5,700 feet deep. It looked much larger than that.

We had been here three days now, and I still couldn't quite get over it. The colors, the lines, the seemingly limitless array of plateaus and precipices, all bathed in an ever shifting wash of sunlight and shadow—the place simply took my breath away.

As for Big Joe, I think he had seen enough that first day, when he learned that a party-size bag of Baconettes was going for almost four dollars at the only market/liquor store on the park grounds.

"So what do you think?" he asked me a good ten minutes into our run along the Canyon's south rim, without any kind of lead-in to the question. "Now that you've had some time to sleep on it?"

"What do I think about what?"

"About what? About
him!
That brain surgeon son of yours. Who else?"

"Oh."

"You don't still think he's telling the truth, I know."

"You mean about the dead man yesterday?"

"I mean about everything. All that stuff about being offered a job with the Raiders, and needing a thousand dollars for clipboards and stopwatches—everything."