Wolf at the Table, page 31
“I had a bunch of these made at this little office-supplies store up in Robinsonville,” Alec says of the postcard. “Would you do me the honor and sign it for me?”
“Like, you want like my autograph?”
“If you wouldn’t mind,” Alec says. “I have a feeling it’s gonna be worth something someday.”
“But you’ve never even seen me play.”
“Sometimes you look at a person and see something,” Alec says. “You just know.”
“Shit, I’ll sign it,” Jermaine says. “Whatever’s clever.”
Alec hands him a black felt-tip pen. “Print your name first,” he says, “then sign below it. It’s more valuable that way.”
“Cool,” Jermaine says, and in childlike block letters, he prints his name on the blank side of the postcard. He then writes his signature directly below it. “You want me to put my uniform number on there too?” he asks.
“No,” Alec says. “But what is it?”
“One,” Jermaine says. “For obvious reasons.”
“Who wore number one?” Alec says.
“Ozzie Smith, homie.”
“He played shortstop, right?”
“Plays,” Jermaine says. “Don’t retire my man just yet. The Wizard of Oz is the best defensive shortstop of all time. Some people want to put Cal Ripken up there, or like Barry Larkin, but I’m not havin’ it.”
“Ozzie’s the one who does all those backflips,” Alec says.
“He does backflips, has won some crazy amount of gold gloves, played in mad All-Star games, stole mad bases. One of the greatest Cardinals of all time.”
“Then by all means,” Alec says, “add your uni number.”
Jermaine nods and adds a large #1 beside his signature, then hands Alec the felt-tip pen, the postcard.
Alec takes a moment to read it. “Thanks for this,” he says. “Seriously.”
Then Jermaine asks Alec if he can finally see his fancy baseball card. “You haven’t even shown it to me,” he says.
Alec reaches into one of the other pockets of his shorts—the special pocket that zips—and produces Mickey Mantle’s rookie card, which is preserved in a thin magnetized Lucite frame. He flashes the front, the back.
“Damn,” the boy says. “That’s like for real for real.”
He reaches for it but Alec pulls it away.
“Tsk-tsk, not yet,” Alec says. “You still have to beat my score.”
Jermaine hits the reset button on the handset, starting the game over. As the game’s intro music plays, Alec crosses to the living room window and lowers the blinds. According to his green Rolex Submariner Hulk watch, which he won in a late-night poker game down in Boca Raton two months ago, it’s almost seven forty-five a.m. The sun is weak today, hardly lighting the skin of the lake. A loon dives for a fish but comes up empty.
“To help you focus,” Alec says of closing the blinds. “I want to give you every opportunity to succeed.”
For the next hour, the boy plays Donkey Kong with newfound determination, his brow furrowed, his bottom lip tucked under his top row of teeth, giving his face a goofy, rabbitlike appearance. He fails four times, then takes a break and drinks another Red Bull, which Alec had set beside him on the carpet.
Alec can’t stop laughing. Lying back on the sectional he puts away another three Coors Lights, then a fourth. He’s starting to feel a little drunk, a little sleepy. He decides to make a pot of coffee, but abandons that project when he realizes he’s run out of filters.
“You want music?” he asks.
“Nah,” the boy says. “Lemme focus.”
After another two failures, Jermaine stands and starts doing jumping jacks, then push-ups. He runs in place, counting out a hundred, his thighs firing like pistons, his knees ramming into his outstretched palms. Then he sits and begins again.
By eight a.m. he comes within six hundred points of Alec’s record. And then two hundred of the record twenty minutes later. And then, finally, at nine ten a.m, he beats it by sixty points.
Alec is half awake on the sectional with his legs outstretched, having kicked off his sandals.
“Yo, John!” Jermaine cries. “I did it! I beat your score!”
Alec sits upright, then unfolds himself to standing, fighting the chronic ache in his ankles and knees. He takes a step toward the flatscreen.
Jermaine is in the process of entering his initials, “JAH,” at the top of the leaderboard, sending Alec’s “JCL” down to the number-two slot.
Alec offers his sincere congratulations.
“I had the will,” the boy says, completely wired still. “You gotta have mad will.”
“What’s the A stand for?” Alec asks of the boy’s initials.
“Anthony,” Jermaine says. “Jermaine Anthony Holloway.” He turns to Alec. “What’s the ‘C’?”
“Christopher,” Alec says. “John Christopher.”
“Anthony and Christopher,” Jermaine says. “Ain’t they both saints? I know Saint Anthony is the patron saint of lost things.”
“Then maybe he can help me find my old Zippo,” Alec jokes. “Or the last thirty years of my life.”
“I can’t remember what Saint Christopher does,” the boy says.
“He’s probably the patron saint of toothaches and bad knees,” Alec offers.
“I think it might be travelers,” Jermaine says. “Like tourism and whatnot.”
“Why do you know so much about the saints?” Alec says. “You religious?”
“My auntie collects ’em,” Jermaine says. “Those little figurines that are like yay tall. She’s got a whole glass cabinet filled with ’em.”
“Is that what she does with her blackjack money?”
Then a stillness passes over Jermaine and he simply says, “Fuck.” He bolts upright, still clutching the control module. When he reaches his full height he accidentally yanks the gaming port out of the side of flatscreen, which causes the television to switch to the morning news.
The onscreen image features a federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, billowing with smoke. A famous news anchor is describing the events. He is beside himself with confusion, grasping for common sense, for facts.
“A massive car bomb exploded outside a large federal building in downtown Oklahoma City,” he says, “shattering that building, killing children, killing federal employees, and civilians. The chaos in downtown Oklahoma City resembled Beirut after what police believed to be a twelve-hundred-pound car bomb ripped through the nine-story federal building only minutes ago. More than five hundred people were already in their offices, and over fifty children were in a daycare center on the second floor…”
It looks like something out of a Hollywood movie. Alec and Jermaine both watch, utterly mesmerized.
“Is this real?” Jermaine says.
“I think it is,” Alec says.
The smoke just keeps billowing out of the building. It’s almost too real to be true. The boy’s bottom lip has drawn up under his teeth again. They continue watching the news, riveted by that endless apocalyptic smoke.
By the time the news story has shifted to another reporter at the scene, Alec has produced a pair of police handcuffs. Slowly, quietly, he cuffs first Jermaine’s left wrist, then his right.
“Yo, John, what the fuck are you doin’?” Jermaine says.
But the rag doused with chloroform is already over the boy’s face, and not even a minute later, after a brief struggle, the boy is rendered silent and his body goes limp.
Out on the lake the engine of a motorboat has scared off the loon and two men are fishing for white sturgeon and crappie and drumfish. The bait shops, which opened at dawn, have likely sold half their haul of night crawlers and crickets and maggots; they always do on mornings such as this. It’s probably not even 70 degrees yet, cool out there on the lake.
Alec imagines the morning sun finally streaming through the clouds, dappling the skin of the water. The two-headed rope and wooden dowel have been taped under his leather sectional all this time, for easy access.
It’s going to be a beautiful day.
13
EUREKA SPRINGS, ARKANSAS
JUNE 14, 1997
MYRA LEE
THE THIRTEEN-HOUR TRAIN RIDE from Chicago to Little Rock felt interminable. Myra’s small sleeper cabin made things a little more comfortable, but by the eighth hour the boredom was like a giant featureless mass that only reminded her of her own acute loneliness. She finished Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist in under eight hours, and while she’d enjoyed it, she didn’t much feel like starting it over. Every few pages she had to take a break, as her eyes, along with everything else, were tired. Despite her fatigue and the recent pervasive weakness she’s been experiencing, as long as there was something to grab on to every few feet, she felt confident moving about the train. She even enjoyed a conversation she had with an old Black man in the dining car. His name was Udonis Bunch and he was on his way to visit his son’s family in Midlothian, Texas. Mr. Bunch had a voice like some rich, mysterious sap that bleeds from an ancient tree. He told her all about his five decades managing concessions at Chicago’s old Comiskey Park, right up until the stadium was demolished after the 1990 season. When he asked her what she did for a living and she told him she’d been a nurse at Stateville Correctional in Joliet, he lit up, as his youngest brother, Fennis, happened to be there, serving a lifetime sentence for murder. Mr. Bunch didn’t go into any details about his brother and Myra didn’t press him about it. During her tenure at Stateville she’d never come across Fennis Bunch, which meant that he was probably living a well-adjusted, peaceful existence there, and she told Udonis Bunch as much.
“What a small, small, itty-bitty world this really is,” he said.
Despite Mr. Bunch’s pleasant company, Myra regretted the decision not to fly, which had been made based on the fervent advice of Dr. Baron, her original Chicago-based oncologist, who’d warned that the cabin pressure would not be good for her recovery and that long-distance driving wasn’t a good idea either because of the demands of concentration, not to mention the fact that she might need her pain medication. Despite being in some state of serious discomfort almost every hour of every day for the past year or so, Myra is still conservative with the pain meds. She doesn’t like how loopy they make her feel.
Myra completed her most recent chemotherapy program only three weeks ago and she’s still getting her strength back. Two years ago, after Myra recovered from her first round of chemotherapy, it looked like her cancer would go into remission. The scans were promising. Dr. Baron, normally a staunch realist, seemed genuinely hopeful. To celebrate Myra’s near-clean bill of health, Lexy and her husband, Barry, helped Myra secure a mortgage for a modest house in Waitsfield, Vermont, a small town in the northwest part of the state. Unfortunately, the remission was short-lived, and Myra has endured two cycles of chemotherapy treatments since then. The one she just finished happened at a clinic in nearby Montpelier, and Lexy came to stay with her in Vermont while she battled the intense fatigue and nausea.
Tucked into the hills, the fully winterized house sits on an acre of land, with its own private dock on the Mad River. A little over two thousand square feet, the 1921 Sears and Roebuck bungalow is light green with white trim, and features a second-floor dormer window. There is a screened-in front porch and an additional four-seasons porch, which has been built onto the back of the house. It is surrounded by evergreen trees and Myra has ample space for gardening. After a couple of decades in a cramped, two-bedroom apartment with music blaring from all corners of their building at any given hour, the house has felt like paradise to her. There is the river, as well as hiking trails and so many birds. Waitsfield is so small it barely appears on the Vermont state map, but Myra loves the seclusion. She finally has a peaceful place to live out her days.
Always thin, Myra has lost more weight this time than she did during her previous two chemotherapy cycles. This is now the second reemergence of the cancer. Her new oncologist in Montpelier, Dr. Anthony, was hopeful that the cancer would go into remission—but her most recent scans proved otherwise. Myra has gained some of the weight back but not nearly enough. Her hands look huge to her, the knobs of her wrists monstrous. The trouble is that her appetite just hasn’t fully returned. She eats like a toddler, all soft foods: applesauce and light broths and Jell-O recipes. Even the protein shake she’s been prescribed doesn’t seem ever to settle right. Often an odd metallic odor—something like pennies in the bottom of a rusty coffee can—leaks from her mouth, and everything tastes like metal.
Her general exhaustion, meanwhile, is still intense, and with the slightest bit of comfort she can fall asleep in less than a minute—in chairs, on park benches, in the cabin of a rattling train car. She’s even fallen asleep on the toilet a few times. She sticks to showers, not allowing herself the luxury of a bath out of fear of drowning.
From Little Rock, where she stayed last night, the drive up to Eureka Springs in her rental car, a Ford Escort, took another three and a half hours. She had to stop three times: first to refuel, next, to take a short nap in a rest area, and finally, to gather her thoughts in the parking lot atop Magnetic Mountain, where, as she’d promised her mother she would, she went to see a giant sculpture of Jesus known as Christ of the Ozarks. Myra parked the car and crossed the manicured lawn that leads to the sculpture. It was slow going, as her legs have gotten weaker and weaker lately. She owns an aluminum walking cane and although she travels with it—she promised Dr. Anthony—she refuses to actually use it. It’s currently resting on the bed in her motel room like some terrible, inevitable prop, waiting for her to be lame once and for all.
There were five or six other people milling about the Christ of the Ozarks grounds and taking photos. The sculpture is over sixty feet tall and looks as if it has been made out of white marzipan. Christ’s arms are stretched wide in a benevolent fashion, suggesting the Crucifixion. Ava Larkin would not be pleased that there is no actual cross and would likely dismiss it as blasphemous pagan folk art, or, even worse, as something altogether “Lutheran.” It bears very little resemblance to the portrait of Christ that Myra grew up with in the Larkin dining room. That version of Jesus—a realistic oil painting that hangs in the dining room to this day—depicts him as a thoughtful, somewhat troubled man with prominent shoulder blades, suffering, kind hazel eyes, and a crown of bloody thorns. This statue, on the other hand, is like something out of a Claymation Christmas special. Her mother might actually find it amusing. At least Myra can tell her she kept her promise and paid the visit.
Back in the car, in addition to applying lipstick and rouge, she removed her headscarf and reapplied tea tree oil to her scalp. Myra’s third cycle of chemotherapy in three years has started to make her head itch. This is the third time she’s lost all of her hair, and there is now only the smallest hint of fuzzy regrowth. She’s gotten somewhat used to going bald, but she didn’t experience this kind of scalp irritation the first two times. Clearly those mysterious poisons have done something to her skin. Her friend Marna suggested the tea tree oil—she uses it for the eczema that plagues the backs of her arms—and it definitely helps. Her silk scarf is white and features several colorful birds: Eurasian bullfinches and orange-breasted robins and a pair of red cardinals. It was a gift from Ronan after she’d completed her first round of chemo. Over the scarf, she often sports a blue Chicago Cubs baseball cap, which she is currently wearing as she pulls into Myrtie Mae’s Cafe, on Van Buren Street.
At two thirty p.m. it’s already over 80 degrees—hot for mid-June in this part of the country—and after she rolls up the driver’s-side window of her rental car she takes a moment to gather her things and adjust her headscarf in the rearview mirror. Twenty minutes earlier she spoke to a man with a prolific, nicotine-stained platinum beard who was manning the front desk of a residential motel to which she’d been directed by a priest. Father Joseph, who happened to be the only person present at St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church, wouldn’t reveal much about her brother, Alec, beyond his employment at the church as the groundskeeper. The priest was busy setting hymnals in the pews and humming to himself when Myra entered the small church. With a little pressing he disclosed that Alec, who now goes by Jerry, was very likely enjoying his typical Saturday off. Myra then took another tack and told Father Joseph how St. John the Baptist, her family’s church back in Elmira, was an important cornerstone in the community and especially important to their family. She showed the priest her ID and he somewhat reluctantly agreed to give her Alec’s address at the Statue Road Inn, where the man with the long platinum beard told her he was likely at his favorite lunch spot, Myrtie Mae’s.
Myra decided on making this trip to Eureka Springs in the wake of her mother’s receiving another of Alec’s disturbing postcards, which Myra learned about only the previous Christmas, when she and Ronan spent the holidays in Elmira. After Joan had gone to bed and while Ronan was upstairs, on the phone with Henny, Ava opened the drawer below the phone and removed the postcards. On the front of the one that Myra is currently carrying in her purse is a four-color photograph of the very church she just visited: St. Elizabeth of Hungary of Eureka Springs. In blue ballpoint pen ink, scrawled across the church’s small bell tower, in Alec’s strange, faint handwriting, is the line THIS IS WHERE I WORK. Ava took Myra through every single postcard—there are twenty-one in total—and this was the first time Alec had added anything more than the name of a boy, the number presumably referring to the boy’s age, and the oblique phrase SAYING HELLO AND GOODBYE. Her mother told her she had received a dozen of them in the space of a single year, back in the mid-eighties, and that they had become more intermittent since then.
Seventy-seven at the time, with ailing knees and the constant care of Joan to worry about, she said it was nearly impossible for her to travel. Despite still recovering from her recent treatment, Myra offered that she would go. It would break the monotony of waking, sleeping, napping, and managing her nausea. It would force her to be in the world and engage with other people, which Myra knows is always a good thing while on the mend. After all, over the years she’s been the one person Alec has been in touch with, though not at all during the past decade or so. The truth is that the last time she heard from her brother was on Thanksgiving in 1988, when she and Ronan stayed in Joliet and hosted dinner at the apartment. Marna and her husband, Dale, who’d tracked Denny down all those years ago, and two guards from the prison came over for dinner. With Ronan home from college, Myra was so happy. Then she answered the phone just as the pumpkin pie was being served, and it was Alec telling her that he needed money. He was drunk and slurring his words. It was just five hundred dollars to pay his rent, he said. He was calling from Phoenix, where he claimed to have a job lined up at a company that installed septic systems. He would pay her back, he swore on his life—this despite the fact that he never had, not one single time. How many dozens of similar calls had Myra fielded before that one, and she always wound up wiring Alec something, even if it was a third of the amount he requested. That Thanksgiving was the first time she denied him the money and it turned out to be the last time she would hear from him.
