Onward Toward What We're Going Toward (9 page)

Green drank a beer with his cheeseburger, right out of the bottle, no small glass for him. At one point, the guy walked up to the bar and ordered another bottle of Bud. He nodded at Green, then carried the bottle back to his table and poured some in his glass. Then he went to the bathroom, and when he came out, he played the same Bonnie Raitt song he'd played earlier. Green had hoped that observing another bookie would help him understand how to become a bookie, but it didn't. The bookie seemed like just some guy in a bar. Then it hit Green: that was the trick. He needed to look like some guy in a bar.

 

Despite her rejection, Chic still had a hard time keeping his mind off of Lijy. Standing in the shower one morning, trying to push thoughts of Lijy from his mind, he became so consumed with guilt that he started weeping. Then, he felt guilty for weeping. Fathers didn't weep. They wore neckties and drank coffee and sometimes, by mistake, backed into a car in the grocery store parking lot, but even then, they didn't weep. They also didn't think about other women, especially their brother's wives, and they certainly didn't think about other women while they took showers. He shut off the water and stood there dripping. He could do this, he told himself. He thought of his grandfather telling his father to get his act together.

To try to and keep his mind occupied, Chic threw himself into projects for his newly born son, Lomax. He re-carpeted the basement and changed out the hinges on the closet doors and checked every shingle on the roof, which took him two full weekends and resulted in a sprained ankle when he lost his footing and fell into the backyard.

One night after dinner, Diane put Chic in charge of looking after Lomax while she scrubbed some pots and pans in the kitchen. Chic placed the baby on a blanket on the living room floor and switched on “The Lone Ranger.” Lomax
withered
and giggled and squirmed, but after a few minutes, neither the television nor his son held Chic's attention as his mind drifted to an image of Lijy sitting in front of a mirror brushing her hair. Lomax started to cry, and Diane yelled from the kitchen to see
if everything was all right. Chic didn't hear her because he was thinking about Lijy and didn't hear his son pretty much wailing bloody murder. Finally, Diane stormed into the living room and yelled, “Chic Waldbeeser!” She put the dish towel she was holding over her shoulder and scooped up Lomax and nuzzled him close to her chest and whispered baby talk into his ear. Chic felt so guilty that it was hard for him to breathe. He told Diane that he didn't know how to get Lomax to stop crying, didn't know the tricks she knew, and asked her to help him become a better father. Diane eyed him suspiciously, and Chic knew she wasn't buying it, so he told her that some of the guys at the cannery had talked about how unfair it was that women automatically knew how to take care of babies and men had to be taught. Diane cracked the slightest smile and told Chic to sit down on the sofa. She gently handed him Lomax and showed him how to cradle the baby close to his chest. As Chic held his son, Lomax looked up at him, and his wide eyes were so vulnerable that Chic could feel his heart melting. At that moment, he made a silent vow to put Lijy on a shelf in the back of his mind and never,
ever, ever, ever
think of her again.

However, one Sunday afternoon while Diane and Lomax were at church with Diane's parents, Chic found himself in his car across the street from his brother's house. He had his binoculars trained on the living room window, and through the part in the drapes, he could see Lijy sitting on the sofa, sipping a mug of tea and probably listening to that Duke Ellington song. The binoculars magnified her so that it looked like she was right there, right outside the window of his car, close enough that he could reach out and touch the smoothness of her cheek, the softness of her black hair. He kept the binoculars focused on the window while he undid his fly and worked his penis out. He was concentrating so hard on what he was doing that he didn't hear the police car pull up behind him, didn't hear the sheriff, Larry Hewitt, get out of the police car and walk up to the driver's side door.
Lucky for Chic, Sheriff Hewitt saw only the binoculars, which Chic dropped to the floor of the car when the sheriff screamed, “Waldbeeser!”

Chic reached down and grabbed the binoculars, setting them on his lap to cover his open fly.

“Isn't that your brother's house?” Sheriff Hewitt asked.

“My brother asked me to . . . ah . . . keep an eye on his house. He's out of town.”

“Uh-huh.” Sheriff Hewitt stared at Chic, a hard glare, piercing. He was holding his nightstick in front of him like he was about ready to whack something. “Are you sure you weren't peeping in the window at your brother's wife? The foreign woman.”

“What? No. I wasn't . . . not at all.”

Sheriff Hewitt nodded. “I'll let you go about your business this time. But don't think I'm not going to remember this, Waldbeeser.”

In his rearview mirror, Chic watched Sheriff Hewitt walk back to his police car. He quickly zipped his fly. As Sheriff Hewitt slowly drove by, he pointed to his eyes with his index and middle fingers to show Chic that he'd be watching him. Then he took a left at the corner and was gone.

Chic was shaking. Before he started the car, he suddenly remembered a time when he was seven. He and Buddy were upstairs playing sock ball, a game played with a wadded-up pair of socks. The point of the game was to hit the other person with the wadded up pair of socks. The wrinkle was the person without the sock ball was allowed to hide anywhere in the house, and the person with the sock ball had to count to ten before starting his search. On this afternoon, Chic had the sock ball. After counting to ten, he went off in search of his brother. He first checked under Buddy's bed (his favorite place to hide), but he wasn't there. He then went out into the hallway and checked the linen closet next to the bathroom, throwing the door open and standing there poised with the sock ball cocked ready to throw.
But Buddy wasn't in the linen closet—he was behind the bathroom door, and right after Chic threw open the linen closet door, Buddy decided to make a break for it. He charged out of the bathroom, running the opposite way down the hall toward the master bedroom and the stairs that led to the living room below. Chic slammed the linen closet door shut, causing their mother downstairs in the kitchen to yell, “Don't slam the doors!” He took two steps in pursuit of his brother, then thinking better of chasing after him, stopped. Buddy was trapped between Chic and their parents' closed bedroom door. His only escape route was the stairs, and as soon as Chic wound up to throw the sock ball, Buddy dove for them. He slipped, however, and ended up taking a head-over-heels tumble down the stairs, a crashing somersault that made so much noise their mother set down the spoon she was using to measure vanilla extract and raced out of the kitchen. Buddy ended up on his back at the bottom of the stairs, a few feet from their father, who looked away from the window to Buddy at the exact moment that Chic reached the last step and dropped the sock ball on Buddy's chest and said, “You're it.” His father smiled, a smile that Chic felt all the way to the bottom of his feet. The smile was quick but it had happened; Chic knew it had happened; then it was over, just like that, and his father went back to the window, and their mother came rushing into the living room to attend to Buddy who was beginning to cry, and Chic continued to stand there staring at his father and wondering what he could possibly be looking at out that window.

Chic started the car, and the engine roared to life. He looked over at his brother's house one last time. The drapes were pulled open, and Lijy was standing in the window. She held a mug; her lips were perfectly straight. A wave of fright rushed through his body, a sensation like hearing an unexpected noise in a dark house. He fumbled with the car's gearshift as she waved to him, holding up a hand in a sad hello. Chic ignored her wave. He
pulled away from the curb and took a left—the same left Sheriff Hewitt had taken—and glanced in the rearview mirror to see Lijy still standing in the window, her left hand on the glass, perhaps, he thought, in an attempt to get him to stop.

About ten miles outside of East Peoria, down Creve Coeur Avenue, near the car dealerships, on the banks of the Illinois River—on the other side of the river was Peoria's skyline: the Jay Janssen Building, the Mark Twain Hotel, the Capital One building, the Peŕe Marquette—Green pulled into the parking lot of the Brazen Bull. He had passed the bar for the last week while driving Mary to the Pair-a-Dice. Just glancing at the place, even when crawling by on a road littered with stoplights and strip malls, Green noticed the structure had been home to a fast food restaurant in a former life, maybe a Hardee's or an Arby's. The building had huge, square windows on every side and a drive-through marquee, but those huge windows had been covered with sheets of plywood painted a park picnic table green, and the drive-through marquee had long since been abandoned and was now used as a storage area for a garbage Dumpster and empty beer kegs. An asphalt parking lot the size of an outfield spread out before the building, and at the turn-in off Creve Coeur Avenue was an overgrown landscape planter. In the middle of the planter, a large sign had sprouted up to announce to the drivers that there was a bar named the Brazen Bull offering happy hour from three to eight and all-you-can-eat hot wings on football Sundays, even though there hadn't been a football Sunday in seven months. A bar with a big parking lot usually had big bathrooms. Bad things could happen in bathrooms, and this was one of the reasons Green had been avoiding the place. But this morning he had a
raging headache and needed a drink. Besides, he thought he had this bookie thing figured out—all he had to do was be Green. It was that simple. Just be a guy at the bar. So, that's what he was going to do, and this was where he was going to start.

Days of Our Lives
was playing on a television set at the end of the bar. (Green knew the program because Jane had watched it every day in the hospital.) Cigarette butts polka-dotted the scuffed wood floor, and a cloud of smoke hung over the pool table in the back, where two guys were loudly battling it out. Green ordered a vodka on the rocks from the bartender, a young girl wearing a Harley Davidson tank top. He added some lemon and sugar and took a sip. Not enough sugar, so he emptied another packet into the glass. He then turned to watch the game of pool. One of the players was a kid in his early twenties, wearing a pink polo shirt, the three buttons undone so that his hairless chest showed. The kid leaned over to take a cut shot, seven ball in the corner pocket—a lot of table, and Green knew it was a difficult shot. When the kid missed, Green tried to show that he was into the game, saying, “Oh, that was close.” The kid gave him the once-over, taking in the maroon suit and alligator-skin loafers. Green thought about what the other bookie had said about the suit. He held up his drink. “Nice try.”

The kid turned his attention back to the table. He was playing against an older guy in a leather cowboy vest. The older guy sighted up a straight-in shot, the fourteen into the corner pocket.

“You got money on this game?” Green shouted. “This a money bar?”

The kid looked at Green. “You want next?”

“I'm more of a basketball fan, actually. Professional basketball. The playoffs are happening right now. You a basketball fan? Like either of the teams tonight? Chicago or . . . whoever they're playing.”

“The Jazz.”

“Right. So, you got a favorite?”

The older guy, whom Green later found out everyone at the Brazen Bull called Eight Ball, pulled out of his shot and glared at Green. “Hey, hombre. You mind?”