‘Half and half. I know the feeling.’
They arrived at and moved slowly past the front of Kirk’s small white bungalow. An apricot-colored lamp shone in the front window. It looked warm, even to Kirk, as they almost stopped.
‘Is that it, your window?’ asked Willy-Bob. ‘It looks great.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘God, you’re a nice man. What’s wrong with me I can’t relax and be saved? What’s wrong?!’ Willy-Bob wailed, and burst into tears.
Kirk handed over a Kleenex and then impulsively leaned across and kissed Willy-Bob on the forehead. Willy-Bob’s face, tear-streaked, came up swiftly, surprised.
Kirk pulled back. ‘No offense. No offense!’
They both laughed and circled back through Hollywood to find a small hotel.
Kirk got out of the car.
‘You better get back in,’ said Willy-Bob.
‘You’re not staying here now?’
‘You know I can’t.’
Kirk stood waiting. At last Willy-Bob said: ‘Did you have a lot of girlfriends?’
‘A few.’
‘I should think so. You’re nice-looking. And you behave nicely. Is your marriage happy? Does niceness help that?’
‘I’m all right,’ said Kirk. ‘I miss the way it once was, when we started out.’
‘Oh, I wish I could miss him sometime and get it over with. I’m sick to my stomach now.’
‘It’ll pass, if you give it a chance.’
‘No.’ Willy-Bob shook his head. ‘It will never pass.’
That did it.
Kirk climbed back in and sat for a moment watching the young, fragile man dry his tears.
‘Where do you want me to take you?’
‘I’ll show you the place.’
Kirk put the keys in the ignition and waited. ‘The hotel is here. Last chance for life. Going, going, gone. Nine-eight-seven…’
Kirk looked at the beer Willy-Bob was holding. Willy-Bob laughed quietly.
‘The condemned man drank a hearty meal.’ He crumpled the can, threw it out. ‘Now it’s just junk, like me. Well?’
Kirk swallowed a curse and started the car.
‘There he is!’
They had driven along Santa Monica Boulevard and approached a place called the Blue Parrot. Out front, half in, half out the door, stood the man with the invisible mask and the unseen cape. Right now his mask hung half off his face, his eyes damaged, his mouth wounded, but there he stood, anyway, arms crossed over his chest, foot tapping impatiently.
When he saw Kirk’s car slow and saw who was in the passenger seat, his whole body toppled forward eagerly. But then his mask sank back in place, his spine straightened, his arms crushed his chest firmly as his chin came up and his eyes blazed in silence.
Kirk stopped the car. ‘You sure you want to be here?’
‘Yes,’ said Willy-Bob, eyes down, hands tucked between his legs.
‘You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? It’ll be hell for the next week, or, if I read him right, the next month.’
‘I know.’ Willy-Bob’s head nodded quietly.
‘And yet you want to go to him?’
‘It’s the only thing I can do.’
‘No, you can stay at the hotel and I’ll buy you a compass.’
‘What kind of future is that?’ said Willy-Bob. ‘You don’t love me.’
‘No, I don’t. Now, jump out and run like hell, alone!’
‘Christ, don’t you think I’d like to do that?’
‘Do it, then. For me. For you. Run. Find someone else.’
‘There is no one else, in the whole world. He loves me, you know. If I left him, it’d kill him.’
‘And if you go back, he’ll kill you.’ Kirk took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. ‘God, I feel like someone’s drowning and I’m throwing him an anvil.’
Willy-Bob’s fingers toyed with the door handle. The door sprang open. The man standing in the Blue Parrot doorway saw this. Again, the toppled move of his body, again the return of balance, as a grim line formed around his death-rictus mouth.
Willy-Bob slid out of the car, the bones in his body dissolving as he went. By the time he stood full on the pavement, he seemed a foot shorter than he had been ten minutes ago. He leaned down and peered anxiously in through the car window as if talking to a judge in a traffic court.
‘You don’t understand.’
‘I do,’ said Kirk. ‘And that’s the sad part.’
He reached out and patted Willy-Bob’s cheek. ‘Try to have a good life, Willy-Bob.’
‘You’ve already had one. I’ll always remember you,’ said Willy-Bob. ‘Thanks for trying.’
‘Used to be a lifeguard. Maybe I’ll head down to the beach tonight, climb up on the station, be on the lookout for more drowning bodies.’
‘Do that,’ said Willy-Bob. ‘Save someone worth saving. Good night.’
Willy-Bob turned and headed for the Blue Parrot.
His friend, the man with the now-restored mask and flamboyant cape, had gone inside, secure, certain, without waiting. Willy-Bob blinked at the flapping hinged doors until they stood still. Then, head down in the rain that no one else saw, he walked across the sidewalk.
Kirk didn’t wait. He gunned the motor and drove away.
He reached the ocean in twenty minutes, stared at the empty lifeguard station in the moonlight, listened to the surf, and thought, Hell, there’s no one out there to be saved, and drove home.
He climbed into bed with the last of the beer and drank it slowly, staring at the ceiling until his wife, head turned toward the wall, at last said, ‘Well, what have you been up to, this time?’
He finished the beer, lay back, and shut his eyes.
‘Even if I told you,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t believe it.’
Apple-core Baltimore
On the way to the cemetery Menville decided they needed to pick up something to eat, so they stopped the car at a roadside stand near an orange grove where there were displays of bananas, apples, blueberries, and, of course, oranges.
Menville picked out two wonderful, big, glossy apples and handed one to Smith.
Smith said, ‘How come?’
Menville, looking enigmatic, just said, ‘Eat, eat.’ They stowed their jackets in the car and walked the rest of the way to the graveyard.
Once inside the gates, they walked a great distance until at last they came to a special marker.
Smith looked down and said, ‘Russ Simpson. Wasn’t he an old friend of yours from high school?’
‘Yeah,’ said Menville. ‘That was the one. Part of the gang. My very best friend, actually. Russ Simpson.’
They stood for a while, biting into their apples, chewing quietly.
‘He must have been very special,’ Smith said. ‘You’ve come all this way. But you didn’t bring any flowers.’
‘No, only these apples. You’ll see.’
Smith stared at the marker. ‘What was there about him that was so special?’
Menville took another bite of his apple and said, ‘He was constant. He was there every noon, he was there on the streetcar going to school and then back home every day. He was there at recess, he sat across from me in homeroom, and we took a class in the short story together. It was that kind of thing. Oh, sure, on occasion he did crazy stuff.’
‘Like what?’ said Smith.
‘Well, we had this little gang of five or six guys who met at lunchtime. We were all different, but on the other hand, we were all sort of the same. Russ used to sort of pick at me, you know how friends do.’
‘Pick? Like what?’
‘He liked to play a game. He’d look at all of us and say, “Someone say ‘Granger.’” He’d look at me and say, “Say ‘Granger.’” I’d say “Granger” and Russ would shake his head and say, “No, no. One of you others say ‘Granger.’”
So one of the other guys would say “Granger” and they would all laugh, a big reaction, because he said “Granger” just the right way. Then Russ would turn to me and say, “Now it’s your turn, you say it.” I would say “Granger” and no one would laugh and I’d stand there, feeling left out.
‘There was a trick to the whole thing but I was so stupid, so naive, that I could never figure out that it was a joke, the sort of thing they played on me.
‘Then one time I was over at Russ’s house and a friend of his named Pipkin leaned over the balcony in the living room and dropped a cat on me. Can you believe that?! The cat landed right on my head and clawed my face.
It could have put out my eyes, I thought later. Russ thought it was a great joke. Russ was laughing and Pip was laughing, and I threw the cat across the room. Russ was indignant. “Watch what you’re doing with the cat!” he said. “Watch what the cat was doing with me!” I cried. That was a big joke; he told everyone. They all laughed, except me.’
‘That’s some memory,’ said Smith.
‘He was there every day, was in school with me, my best friend. Every once in a while, at lunchtime, he’d eat an apple and when he finished he’d say, “Apple core.” And one of the other guys would say, “Baltimore.” Russ would then say, “Who’s your friend?” They’d point at me and he’d throw the apple core–hard–at me. This was a routine; it happened at least once a week for a couple of years. Apple-core Baltimore.’
‘And this was your best friend?’
‘Sure, my best friend.’
They stood there by the grave, still working at their apples. The sun was getting hotter and there was no breeze.
‘What else?’ said Smith.
‘Oh, not much. Well, sometimes at lunchtime I’d ask the typing teacher to let me use one of the typewriters so I could write, as I didn’t have a typewriter of my own.
‘Finally, I had a chance to buy one real cheap, so I went without lunch for a month or so, saving my lunch money. Finally, I had enough to buy my
