A youth with a punk haircut, riding a mountain bike one-handed and drinking an orange soda with the other, shot past them a few inches from their toes and Frank told him to slow down. The youth wheeled around in a big circle, came back at higher speed, shaking the soda can, and hosed Frank in the face with it as he surged past. Frank jumped up in pursuit but it was hopeless. When he turned back to the park bench, his face and hair sticky and wet, Gracie was doubled over with laughter.
Frank wiped his face on his sleeve and sat down. He decided not to discuss it. He indulged a little reverie wherein he ran down the boy on the bike, shoved his head through the spokes of his front wheel, then kicked him in the ass at his leisure. Frank smiled to think that he was making less of a distinction these days between what he imagined happening and what actually happened. His carefree jerking off had come to seem advantageous compared to the time-consuming alternatives. But it was laziness, really, or weariness, a collapse of the casual utopianism of his earlier days in which ecstasy was but a hop, skip and jump away.
He watched a young woman in bombacha pants teaching her dog to chase a Frisbee, several robins stretching worms under a sprinkler. An extremely small Asian woman in her sixties set up an easel that faced the dun-colored hills behind the neighborhoods. He felt Gracie next to him. A robust and amiable erection tortured his chinos into an asymmetrical tent.
“My God, what a problem I’ve got,” he said, accepting that it was inconcealable. Gracie gazed around, pretending to search for the object of his enthusiasm.
“You’re all boy, Frank.”
“Thanks, Grace. Now why don’t you come on home. The coffee pot’s on. I’ve hobbled the old goat —”
“And what? We could make some feta cheese? I’m not following. The other thing is, an indecent-exposure rap would go a long way in weakening your case against Lord Haw-Haw.”
Frank thought for a moment. “I have a lot of faith in Holly. She’ll go through this thing and right out the other side.”
“I hope so. I also suspect it as something we’re using for our own purposes.”
“Exactly.”
Here was another ruse, the candid discussion, elevating essentials to a cooler altitude, often accompanied by bad acting and owlish solemnity. It was an ungainly moment. Frank wanted to fall upon his wife like a Saracen.
Just then, Gracie began to sob. Frank said, “Oh, dear, what’s this,” and had no idea what to do. With any slip of control he was going to join in, but he held on and stared off into nowhere to contain himself, and felt sunk. His tear ducts ached under his eyes and a film dropped suddenly over the park as though the credits were about to run on the last scene. At that moment, the boy on the mountain bike shot past once more. Frank elevated his overwrought face in the boy’s direction in time to receive another blast of orange soda, and the can, which bounced off his head.
Frank jumped up and began to race after the boy, who was riding on the rear wheel only and pulling away. He followed him out of the park and into traffic. The boy darted between oncoming cars to an intermittent song of horns, his green shirt shrinking, then wheeled to the right down a side street. Frank himself went to the right and walked a block and a half to an alley, then up it a short distance, where he climbed into a garbage pail and waited, surrounded by a deep vegetable stink, trying to reconcile his desire to kill the boy with his desire to be close to Gracie. He was close to retching but confident the boy would circle back this way for one more look. He meant to explode from the can into the boy’s face and do what he had to do. While he waited, he tried to remember what it was costing to hedge yearling cattle. No one else was doing that, but it was probably a good and original idea for this part of the world. You could certainly do it and the bank would help. Well, maybe not his chickenshit bank.
Gracie wasn’t going to wait around indefinitely. He was beginning to cool down. He thought of Gracie’s tears and he wanted to see her now. He stood up in the garbage pail and found himself facing a screaming old woman in her bathrobe. The woman dropped the black plastic bag she was carrying and scurried into a door that opened onto the alley, yelling “Police!” in what Frank took to be an uneducated accent because she paused too emphatically between the syllables. He looked up to see the boy do a sliding U-turn on his bicycle and head out the opposite way.
Frank made a rapid trudge to the street, where he tried to blend in yet knock the loose garbage from his clothes. He crossed the park from another angle, but their bench — he could tell it was theirs because he could line up the swings and the flagpole — was empty. Now, from a distance, he could see the boy leading two foot policemen his way. There was no time to think; he just had to run forward until he was out of the open space of the park, into an intimate blue-collar neighborhood, through back yards and under clotheslines, knocking a bird feeder out of his way in a spray of seeds, frantically navigating his way to Holly’s house, bursting through her front door and virtually into the arms of Lane Lawlor. Frank was acutely conscious of smelling like sweat and garbage. “Hello again,” he gasped, tilting his head and smiling, a gruesome shot at charm, ungainly in the extreme.
Lane watched him for a moment before speaking. “Let me build you a drink,” he said, making a point of forcing a smile, like pressing his own weight. “I came back to use Holly’s phone.” He paused, as though there was no telling what to expect from someone standing in a slight crouch with an unmistakable tincture of back yard garbage.
“Just catch my breath,” Frank said, moving to the living room and falling into a chair. He remembered seeing a redheaded man who had just had a heart attack at the airport, seated on the floor in a busy Salt Lake concourse, rushing travelers eddying around him, a look of perspiring embarrassment on his face, a morning newspaper at his side. Probably no one but his mother could have comforted him. His pupils were the size of dimes and he definitely seemed to be watching something coming his way.
Lane brought him a drink, the kind of strong drink you made when you meant to let your hair down. Frank was going to be careful of it. And it was a relief to be here with a highly objectified creature like Lane. It had been too much with Gracie. Every attempt to modify his emotions recently had gone upside down. He had just felt wild, and that was too much. He didn’t want that wild feeling taking him off. He wanted the type of steadiness that is always praised, in sports, in life, everywhere. With Lane it could be strenuous yet polite, like an old-fashioned sea battle: gentlemen captains getting their guns into position and altogether out of the question to act or feel wild.
Lane sat down. “Kind of a turbulent time for you,” he said.
“Afraid so.”
“Sometimes it helps having something to set all these tribulations against.”
“Yeah,” said Frank, “like, we sleep for eternity or something.”
“Not quite that dire. Maybe a few values.”
“What kind of values, Lane?”
“The kind you come in from the desert with, the kind that stand you in good stead. The kind that make you one with your own people.”
Lane probably had him here. The people who wanted to stop every river, kill every inconvenient animal and reduce every forest to usable fiber had a remarkable solidarity. They believed that every thing in the natural world was part of a conspiracy against the well-filled lunch bucket, the snowmobile with its topped-off fuel tank and the proper utilization of a deep clip of cartridges. Frank looked at him and tried to imagine him as a child, concluding that Lane had never been a child. He was born a full-sized spokesperson.
“You know,” Frank said, “I have a feeling if we share our philosophies we’re going to end by tearing this apartment up and it doesn’t belong to us.”