good.
Another guy, much taller than the ruddy fellow, walked toward us now. I couldn’t see who it was, but the sheer height of him was wonderful to take in. The insides of my bowels froze. And I felt shorter than I’d felt in ages.
“Evening, gentlemen.” The police badge he flashed managed to catch the light from the street lamp.
“Craig,” I said with a relief too broad, too long.
He wasn’t in uniform. Instead, he had on a navy-blue polo shirt that he’d tucked into his jeans to hold the fabric as close as possible to his torso. He looked like he’d been airbrushed in real life, up and off the page. “Someone isn’t happy here?”
“The man violated a no trespassing order,” Red said.
“The gentleman thinks”—I couldn’t stop the smile on my face—“the gentleman thinks I’m here to steal property.”
“Oh yeah?”
“And he doesn’t think I can read.”
Craig Luckland looked at the guy as if he were expecting someone to come out behind a tree to take his picture. He had the kind of face that had always known it was handsome. The man behind that face knew that it could get him anything he wanted. Luckland’s love for himself would have enraged me if it hadn’t been so weirdly magnetic. Still, it helped no one in town that Luckland had just appeared in a reality show about bachelor cops. Now he couldn’t even concentrate without thinking about every lift and turn of that expensive face. The truth was he’d eat off his underpants on another reality show if it ensured his place in front of the camera. But that didn’t mean I didn’t like the guy.
“We’ve lost ten thousand dollars this week,” Red said.
“And you saw Mirsky stealing something.”
“I happened to be walking around the property,” Red said.
“I guess I missed the sign,” I said, shrugging.
“Well, then,” Luckland said.
Then Luckland took him by the arm and drew him aside.
He drew his head to the guy, talking in low, confidential tones, more counselor than policemen. He kept almost aiming his face of great concern and patience at the guy’s lesser face, blond-red, with babyish features. It didn’t take long for Luckland’s eyes to harden. They gave up a shock of raw feeling above the practiced smile. The guy simply wasn’t giving him what he wanted. What was it that Craig wanted?
Then I got it: he was waiting to be recognized.
Luckland walked over to me, still smiling, but weary about the eyes, as if the direct challenge to his star power had hit him where he lived. It told him the tale of his fate from here on out: life in our town would never give him what he needed.
“What timing,” I said. “What if you hadn’t come by? Shit.”
We watched Red moving down the street, his walk deliberate and henny. Buck, buck, buck, buck, buck, said the walk.
“You’re not naked,” Craig said, rubbing his shaved chin.
I pictured the corners of my smile held up with pushpins. I asked him what he was talking about.
“You,” he said, “you always have your shirt off. Every time I run into you. I’m surprised you even have any clothes in your closet. Do you have clothes in your closet?”
“Is that right?” I felt my expression changing, though I tried to remember the old trick: keep it stony, keep it plain.
“And you’re not singing something. Aren’t you always singing a little tune?”
“I don’t sing.”
“As if you don’t sing.”
“What do I sing?”
“What are you usually singing? ‘Born to Run.’ Yeah,” he said, pleased with his ability to make connections. “That’s it.”
I tried to reach for something witty, but I came up short. I’d never sung “Born to Run” in my life. At once, I felt that rude, rash desire to get away fast and quick. The deadly effect of standing in the presence of an authority figure whom I was expected to suck up to but couldn’t without seeming false, or looking like some totally extinct bird.
We started talking—Laura, Joan, my truck accident, everything you’d imagine. But my mind kept going back to his assessments of me. He hadn’t been making fun—I’d have been taking myself too seriously if I’d thought he’d been making fun. But I felt a little crazed. Who wanted to be told that he’d lost the ability to surprise and change, that he’d finally become himself: a man whose two coordinates were his body and his singing? Even as he’d been standing up for me, I knew he saw me as someone who’d never lived up to his potential, an aimless joeboy who’d leave the world without a mark or a stain. Maybe it was all about the effects of that face on me, a face with such magnetizing power that it could pulverize steel, draw water from stone. It said: I’m embedded in the world, while you’re only halfway here. A woman would take me over you any day, and isn’t it a sign of the brute injustice of this world that you were born yourself and not me? In another situation I might have laughed aloud at the absurdity of it, but what if he was right? What if I was already dead and was the last to find out? What if I wasn’t fully present enough in my life to give myself memories? No connections made, no ability to sustain a conversation: a phantom, a walking ghost, a Frankenstein monster.
And what about the women I’d loved? What had I given them?
I looked up. I imagined a trash fire inside the corners of an unfinished room until the house was charred.
“I need a job.” And it came out with such desperation that I turned my face away. Hot tears roiled in the base of my throat.
Then Craig put his arm around my shoulder and smiled with characteristic concern, as if our rightful places in the grand scheme of things had been assumed.
“I was waiting for you to ask.”
But I hadn’t always been a member of the walking wounded. Once the world had been brighter and alive, rich with incident:
1982. I’m making my way to my high school algebra classroom. A crowd gathers outside the doors of the auditorium. Mrs. Muscufo tries to break it up. Voices are raised, but only a few do as they’re told. I’m fourteen. I should keep going—isn’t it about time for a pop quiz? Instead, I stand on my toes, flex my calves until they’re stopped up with blood. Everyone is tall: eager and greedy and ruthless. There’s a sour smell of hot woolens. Why am I here? I can’t tell you that. Instinctively, I hate crowds and anything that draws crowds: sports, tournaments. Send me to the outfield, and watch me drop the ball from my mitt, screwing it up for my team. And yet I can’t tear myself away. I’m losing precious minutes as my algebra teacher is most likely handing out the pop quiz.
In seconds, I work my way to the front of the crowd so that I’m standing inside the dark vault of the auditorium. The stage itself is drenched with red-gold light.
