Hello, I must be going. A not-so-graceful exit.
By Joel Deutsch
“Good old student deferment,” reminisced Nick with a thin smile.
“Yeah,” said Daniel.
“And then they dropped that and went to the lottery system. Which makes sense, man, you know? Randomness is reality, not the other stuff.”
Daniel wasn’t sure what Nick thought he was saying, exactly, but he knew what he probably meant, and it wasn’t cosmological. It was something about privilege.
“Guess I just got lucky,” he said, feeling vaguely guilty. It was Nick’s tone that discomfited him, a shadow of irony, a weird vibe.
“I was delivering pizza back then,myself,” Nick said. “Staying stoned, hanging out, just going with the flow, like we used to say. My old man wanted me to do the school thing, get a degree. You know? But I just couldn’t make myself deal with all the bullshit.”
“right,” said Daniel, anxious to be gone and waiting for the opening.
“And so then here comes Uncle Sam, knockin’ on my door, and that’s all she wrote.”
Never mind the opening, thought Daniel. It was now or never. “Nick, I really have to split, or I’m just going to fall flat on my face. You take good care of yourself, okay? Maybe we’ll see each other up here again, one of these days.” He didn’t offer his hand, not wanting to subject himself to a replay of the solidarity routine.
Nick nodded, with the gravity of someone who has just understood something. “Later, man,” he said, and rotated the wheelchair back around to face the table and his computer.
Turning to go, Daniel glanced over at the food truck, meaning to wave goodbye to Miguel, but the service window was vacant, just as he had initially found it, its cold fluorescent glow fading against the gray developing dawn. Hollow and numb with exhaustion, he headed for the Camaro in its parking space on the other side of the beat-up van which he now knew to be Nick’s.
At the closest pump island, an enormous white Winnebago was gassing up. A plump young woman with sleep-mussed hair, in flip-flops, shorts and a pink sweatshirt with DISNEYLAND emblazoned across the front above the face of Mickey Mouse, was stepping down from the recreational vehicle’s side door, a coffee mug in one hand and the edge of an unfolded road map in the other. Behind her, in the doorway, stood a little boy about three or four years old, wearing pajamas, rubbing his eyes.
Alongside the next island over was a pickup truck couple to a two-masted sailboat on a trailer. A man in an International Orange nylon windbreaker, Levis and deck shoes, the sailor, presumed Daniel, stood before the cashier’s booth, transacting business.
Approaching the car, Daniel reached into his right pocket and fished out keys and cell phone. He had carried the cell along with him on his excursion, with the ringer shut off, mostly in case he needed roadside service. Now, as he pointed his keychain remote fob and pushed the button to unlock the Camaro’s doors, he flipped the phone open and checked its pale blue screen for missed calls and voice mail, although he hadn’t felt it vibrate once. Nothing.
Just who he expected to have tried to reach him over the past few hours, he couldn’t have said. Sheila? She didn’t even call him during the day, unless it was something they had to discuss about Melanie. Melanie, maybe? A middle-of-the-night post adolescent college student crisis? Sometimes Melanie seemed more mature in her way than he felt, lately,, himself, more clear about her life than he was feeling about his. Sure, she called now and then just to chat, but during the evening or on the weekend. And she emailed him regularly from her bedroom in the off-campus apartment she shared with an ever-changing cast of two, three or four roommates, frequently at exactly such night-owl hours, according to the time stamps on the messages he found in his inbox at home or on his office PC the next morning. But a 3 A.M. freakout call? Not likely.
And then there was Jacqueline, the new paralegal at the Law Offices of Barry J. Brackman, whose facilities did not actually include any private offices except for Brackman’s own, with its huge magisterial oak desk, Persian carpets and a window looking out onto the incessant traffic of South Beverly Drive.
Jacqueline, 36 (Daniel had accessed her information on the server) was magnificently blonde and, Daniel could easily see beneath the businesslike cut of the suits she wore to work, abundantly well favored physically, voluptuous without verging on the kind of cushioned female body type his father would have called zaftig. She had been a struggling pop musician, a singer who wrote her own songs and accompanied herself at the piano, but that career hadn’t flourished, so as she edged into her thirties, not making it as a singer-songwriter, not married, either, and losing her sense of direction altogether, a lawyer she had dated, ready to cut her loose for the inconvenient sin of carrying too much psychological “baggage,” had, over double Margaritas at the bar of the El Coyote restaurant, convinced her to train as a paralegal. For something to fall back on, as her parents had advised her in the first place.
All this Daniel had learned, not from her computerized personal data , but in conversation during the lunches they had begun taking together now and then at one or another of the cafes nearby, at Daniel’s invitation. Daniel paid the check and played the workplace confidante as she poured out her stories of bad luck and trouble. Recording deals gone wrong, a trusted lover-manager’s desertion, the toxic resentment of an older soccer-mom sibling, once an aspirant to the same kind of career herself, that her little sister should have gotten anywhere near to such a goal, even if no farther than to play occasional cabaret dates for rock-bottom pay or a cut of the door while she circulated demo CDs to agents and producers and uploaded stark, self-recorded digital files of her songs to her online home page, earning much emailed adulation and more than a few romantic or just sexual come-ons from males and females alike, but no other advantage. And then there were the none-too-subtle hints of darker soul-murk in days gone by, which Daniel divined from her repeated use of phrases like “making amends,” which were too formal for the conversational style of the times but widely understood to be from the canonical lexicon of twelve step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, but about which he wasn’t yet ready to ask anything.
Right, thought Daniel. An emergency booty call from Jacqueline, stricken with a sudden realization that she just had to have him. Dream on, kid. Dream on.
realization that she just had to have him. Dream on, kid.
“HOO-AH!” Daniel was flipping the cell phone closed when one of Nick’s wheelchair tires slammed into the back of a leg, toppling him forward so fast that he barely got a hand out to break the fall, and still he felt his forehead slap the asphalt.
“HOO-AH! HOO-AH!” shouted Nick as he launched himself out of his seat onto the prostrate Daniel. The man had formidable upper body strength, all that wheelchair work , Daniel imagined, and the ferocity of the sudden assault was fearsome, no one having laid a combative hand on him since a hallway scuffle in tenth grade at Fairfax High. He tried to push himself up and throw off the boozy, flailing maniac as Nick’s punches kept raining down.
Whump! A hard one to his right-side rib cage that felt like it broke bone. “Hoo-ah!” A closed-hand smash to the left temple. Daniel could feel his brain ricocheting inside his skull. “yellow-belly cocksucker!” Another body blow, this one to the right kidney. Nick was holding him down with one hand and punching with the other, changing hands as the placement of blows demanded. “Let the Nick Zanettis do your fighting for you while you demonstrate with all the other spoiled little brats. Fuck you, man. Just fuck you! People like you are a blood blister on the brain of the fucking world.” More blows punctuated this harangue and followed it, and now the pain was coming from so many places that Daniel could not even localize it anymore. Did Nick have something in those remorseless gloved paws of his? And did he know, no, of course he couldn’t know, but did he possibly intuit, somehow, the part Daniel had so judiciously left unsaid, the actual reason for his military nonservice? No, that’s just paranoid, Daniel reassured himself as the blows kept coming.
With great effort, he finally managed to raise his chest a few degrees off the ground, giving silent thanks for all the bench presses he’d done at the gym after work to put off going home alone too the new apartment.
But then another weight crashed onto his back, and he collapsed again, and then all the weight rolled off him, all at once, in a commotion of struggle and grunting. Gingerly, Daniel rolled onto his side and looked. Miguel, sans apron, was sprawled atop a struggling, face-down nick, twisting one of his arms backward at an unnatural-looking angle, fierce determination on his flat-nosed, big-browed face, which Daniel, in the enormity of his relief, found suddenly beautiful.
“Get off me, you squatty little wetback mutant!” Nick grunted. “,You’re breaking my fucking arm!” In response to which Miguel muttered something lethal-sounding in Spanish through clenched teeth and bore down harder.
A gunshot shattered the early morning quiet, followed by the startled shriek of a baby. The mother in the Disneyland sweatshirt rushed back into the Winnebago, pushing her little boy ahead of her. The man in the orange windbreaker dashed the few feet to his pickup and disappeared behind it. The kid in the cashier’s booth popped out of his door like a cuckoo clock figure, stood gaping for a second, then popped back inside again.
“Okay, mister,” came a woman’s voice from behind them. “ that’s enough! Just lie still and keep your hands where I can see them. Miguel, why don’t you just get yourself clear of that fool, babe.”
Daniel looked around, and there she was, Miguel’s wife, framed in the lonchería window. She was definitely not a dwarf, not even a small Mexican woman. Not Mexican at all. she was Five-seven, at least, Daniel guessed, fair-skinned with long tresses of red hair, redder than his had ever been before the gray came in,, cascading to her shoulders. She wore an untucked green football jersey. The child, whose screams of alarm were subsiding into rhythmic sobbing punctuated by hiccups, was strapped to her back in a baby carrier of some sort. And in both hands, held out before her in regulation pistol firing form, she gripped the Magnum Miguel had shown him earlier, sighting down its long barrel in their direction.
“Shush, sweetie,” she reassured the squalling child without taking her eyes off them. “Cálmate, mi amor. Tranquilito. Mommy’s here.”
To be continued…