Kids These Days (14 page)

“Right here,” I said.

“You coming, or what?”

“I have to see if Alice needs the car,” I said.

She shook her head, whispered, “Go.”

Mid said, “What we need to get you is your own transportation. Maybe the company can find something for you.”

“You sound better,” I said. “I mean, today. You sound OK.”

“Moved a few things around. Flowed up the cash flow, if you know what I mean.”

I said, “Where are you? Which one?”

“Anastasia Station,” he said. North, up past the grocery.

I checked the clock on the stove. “I can be there in fifteen minutes,” I said.

“You want me to get them to wait?”

“Sure,” I said.

“OK. Let me go slow them down,” he said, and we hung up.

Alice said, “Off to work?”

“His Twice-the-Ices came in.”

“Will you be back for dinner?”

“I think so.”

“Call me if you're going to be later than that.”

“I will,” I said.

“Twice-the-Ice,” she said. “It doesn't sound like any way to get rich to me.”

“I didn't think so, either.”

She said, “Do you think he knows what he's doing?”

“I think he thinks those things are little college funds.”

“What do you think?”

“I think they're trailers that sell ice,” I said. “But I'm just the yes man.”

She looked at me. “You are, aren't you?”

“For now, anyway.”

“And then what?”

One I knew the answer to, finally. “And then I have no idea.”

“And then you go undercover.”

“Something like that.”

“Whatever that even means.”

“He'll get it worked out,” I said.

“Sure he will. We all will.” She put her hair on top of her head, straightened a painting of a pelican that hung over the toaster, and went back in the bedroom without saying anything else. I don't know why I did it, but after she closed the door, I reached out and nudged the painting crooked again. Then I took the keys and left.

The first Twice-the-Ice worked like a dream. You shoved in your seven quarters, chose between the buttons that said
BAG
and
BULK,
and you either caught your bag or shoved your cooler under, depending. Sixteen pounds of glistening, frozen-solid ice, delivered instantly while you stood there in the sanctified glow of the very future itself. Mid and I each bought probably twenty dollars of ice the first day we had the thing up and running. We gave bags away for free to anybody who came up to see what was going on. Public relations, Mid said. Marketing. Grand Opening. We gave bag after bag to people who weren't prepared to take them, who put them sweating and melting into their trunks, down onto their floorboards. Mid said the thing about it being twice the ice was that even if they lived a long way away, they still had an even chance of there being a regular amount of ice left by the time they made it home. People seemed to appreciate that line of reasoning. Mid handed out business cards with the two locations of the Twice-the-Ices listed. “Twice the Twice-the-Ice,” the cards said.

The second Twice-the-Ice made only very cold water, which was a problem. You put your quarters in, and the building gave off a groan like it was trying to work, like it wanted to, but then out of the bulk chute came a pretty steady stream of water, and out of the bag chute came an empty bag. Mid fed five rounds of quarters in and got the same thing each time—empty bag, water on the ground—and then he was on the phone to the home office, and they were telling him they'd have somebody out by the end of the week, Monday at the latest.

We went by a few days later on our way out to see Hurley and the cabins at Devil's Backbone, and Mid had gotten a banner made that said
COMING SOON.
It was hanging across the front of the trailer.

“Twice as soon,” I said.

“No,” he said.

“No what?”

“Just no.”

Mid was still sleeping at the beach house, but he and Carolyn and the kids had started eating dinner again as a family. Carolyn's idea, he said, which he was taking as a good sign. He was thinking he'd be back home in a couple of days. Alice was telling me, over our own quiet dinners, that she thought it'd be a little longer than that. Still, he seemed better, seemed pasted back together reasonably well. This was perhaps Mid not on the very edge of the precipice, or of prison. This was Mid with half his Twice-the-Ices up and running. We rode down A1A, him telling me what they'd done the night before, how he'd dragged the kettle grill into the yard and done a whole turkey, how the twins had ended up fighting over the wishbone. “They fight about everything lately,” he said. “They fight about fighting.”

We passed a stuccoed church that had a yellow fire engine parked out on the lawn, lights turning, teenagers all over it holding posterboards that said
PRAY N' WASH.
“That seems unlikely,” Mid said.

“What was that?”

“If we're supposed to believe the signs,” he said, turning around in a gas station, “it's a Pray N' Wash.”

“I don't think I get it.”

“I feel like it's self-explanatory,” he said. He pulled us into the turning lane, set the blinker.

“What are you doing?”

“Seeing if it's self-explanatory.”

“Mid. Come on.”

He said, “What's the worst that can happen?”

“We get raptured?”

“I think that happens differently.” He eased us through an opening in the traffic. “But I'd have to look it up.” The kids on the fire engine waved us in. “This thing could use a wax and polish, anyway,” he said.

“The sign didn't say wax and polish,” I said.

He said, “Maybe we'll get lucky.” We got in line behind a red minivan. A boy, maybe sixteen or seventeen, had his forehead pressed against the van door, and he had his hand in through the open window. He was praying with whoever was driving. The windows were tinted, so beyond a postcard-sized movie that was playing on a drop-down screen in the back seat, we couldn't see much. The movie had geese in it, flying by in Vs. On the ground, there were people watching the geese. There was a girl. All this was taking place somewhere very green. The kid finished his prayer and sent the van over to a Quonset hut that looked like it was probably the meetinghouse for the youth group. Several kids in ponchos and modest-length shorts were soaping and rinsing down cars. The prayer kid signaled us forward, and Mid rolled down his window.

“Hey!” the kid said. He had a plain kind of good looks, like somebody in an orange juice commercial. “Are you guys feeling full of the spirit today?”

“We are,” said Mid. I said nothing.

“That's terrific,” the kid said. “I'm Jason.”

“Mid,” Mid said. Then he took my hand. “This is Walter.”

“Peace, Walter,” Jason said. I nodded. Mid did not let go of my hand. Jason said, “What would you guys like to ask God's guidance in today?”

“We could use some technical assistance,” Mid said. “For one thing, I've got an ice machine that won't make any ice.”

“OK,” said Jason.

“Walter got the water hookups in just fine, so that can't be it. We're thinking it's something internal. Gears and wires, you know? It's a bitch. And so long as we're being honest, I've got a little thing going with law enforcement that could use some oversight. Plus a domestic situation.”

“Wow,” Jason said.

“But more importantly, Walter's wife is pregnant.” Mid held my hand tighter, held our two hands up in the air. “Things have been difficult,” he said.

“Wait,” Jason said, squinting in at us. “I think I know this one. What we could do is just ask for God's love to be brought more completely into your lives. How would that be?”

“We were hoping you could do something about making it a boy,” Mid said. “I think if he's got to have it, then he really wants a boy.”

“Mid,” I said.

“Walter,” he said, “everything is going to be just fine.” He turned back to Jason. “Right?”

“Right,” Jason told him.

There were several things I could have done. I could have told Jason that there wasn't any point in praying for a boy, and that it didn't make any difference either way, regardless. I could have told Mid to stop fucking with the poor kid, to get us out of line and on with our afternoon.

“Can he be tall?” I said. “And left-handed?”

I'd never seen Mid so pleased. “Yes,” he said. “Left-handed is going to be key, Jason. It'll be a hell of a lot easier for him to break into the majors. He can be a pitcher. Middle-inning relief. He'll make us all rich. We won't need any ice machines. If you can make him a left-handed reliever with a good breaking ball and a handlebar mustache, we can see what we can do about cutting you in on the deal.”

Jason said, “I'm not sure it would be right to ask for something like that.” He said, “God has a plan for each of us.”

“I guess that could be true,” Mid said. He sounded like he might actually be considering the possibility.

“It
is
true,” Jason said, warming up to what he knew. “He has a plan for each of us. Each of us is special in His eyes.”

“I have to say I sometimes don't feel all that special,” Mid told him.

“But you are,” Jason said. “Each of us is so unique. That's what we all have in common.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pastor David says that each of us carries a toolbox of gifts.”

“A what?”

“A toolbox,” Jason said. “Each and every one of us possesses—”

Mid said, “Jason, Walt and I need to go speak with a gentleman about some rental villas he's building in a tidal swamp, so maybe we should just get this taken care of. What do you say?”

It was clear Jason wanted to push ahead with the toolbox, but he also had a kind of customer-is-always-right thing going on, and the latter won the day. He took Mid's other hand—Mid was still holding mine—and without much more warning he started praying for us, an overarching request for grace and mercy and something about opening a door, behind which there would be a light showing us the true and gentle nature of God's eternal might and glory. I had in mind a bare bulb hanging from a closet ceiling. Jason could have been praying for anybody. He did not mention giving my daughter a quick move to first, a workable knuckle-curve. He moved along into some boilerplate about how abidingly good God was, about how He was so good, and ridiculous as it was there at the Pray N' Wash, with Mid holding my hand and Jesus Christ's very own personal Tropicana spokesboy raining down favor upon us, there was an idea I felt come over me, a vague communion, a feeling that if something like the rapture or perhaps minor coastal flooding were to arrive right then, that we'd still be alright, at least in the short term. I was suddenly sure that we'd hash something out, Jason and Mid and me. We would triumph against long odds. Then the kid finished praying, and that passed, and I dropped back to my baseline reading, a kind of gentle, hazy panic. Though there was comfort in that, too—in drifting back to what I knew. Mid let go of my hand. Jason pulled his arm out of the Camaro, told us to shine, and sent us on to get hosed down.

“That was nice,” Mid said, while the rest of the youth group washed the car. “Probably I don't need that every day, but I'll take it.”

Comfort in panic: I'd felt it all along, since I'd stood in the kitchen flipping French toast while Alice went in the bathroom to pee into one of our juice glasses, afraid she wouldn't be able to go long enough to hold the stick in the stream right. She'd determined that dunking would be the superior method. And it was—it worked—I had the second sides browning when she made a little noise, a sound like she'd shut her finger in something not all that heavy, and I knew well before she came around the corner that the stick would have its two pink lines. Are you happy, she wanted to know. Sure I was. Sure and sure. I flipped the toast. We ate breakfast and I got pretty convinced there was a hum in the room, that the house had developed some new vibraphonic frequency, that in time the harmonics would find their way to the exact right pitch and point to shake us all to dust. I made more French toast. Alice sat at the table, pregnant. The hum set in.

What surprised me was that I'd come, in a way, to like the hum—or at least to recognize it, to reach for it first thing in the morning. Our daughter, Hall-of-Fame relief pitcher Rollie Fingers, was out there, waiting, getting ready in the bullpen. I knew what that was. I had an idea. The books told us how to measure: The fetus was the size of a paper clip, then a Damson plum. I did not know what a Damson plum was, but I could guess. That was not the problem. It was the
after
that was the problem, that seemed so unimaginable. No amount of praying and washing could get you ready.

The youth-groupers soaped us, rinsed us, buffed us dry with a Superman towel. Mid thanked them and passed ten bucks through the window. The kids told us to be careful as we entered the mission field, and Mid told them we'd do what we could. We pulled back out around the circle drive, waited at the road. The sun shone down clean and bright. The hood gleamed. Mid flipped the visor down on his side. A light blue scooter went by in front of us, hugged up against the curb, close enough that we could have nosed out and knocked it over. It was the boy from the other night, from the beach, Nicodemus, and there was Delton, riding behind, wearing no helmet, arms wrapped around him, hands on his chest, hair blowing in the wind. “Well, hell on a cracker,” Mid said.

“On a scooter,” I said. They disappeared around a curve. I said, “That's that kid.”

“Yeah.”

“How old is he?”

Mid said, “He's nineteen.”

“Nineteen?”

“Believe me,” he said. “I know.”

“Is that even legal?”

“Doesn't seem to matter so much,” he said.

“Doesn't matter how?”

“He calls. He comes by. And that was her on the back of that thing, right?”

I said, “It was.”

“That's how.”

“Is he a nice kid, at least?” I said.

“He seems like it, I guess. She's seen him every day since that party. He's supposed to come by for dinner one of these nights, show us what a fine upstanding young man he is. She wants us to get to know him.”

“Nineteen,” I said.

“He's probably getting ready to enter her mission field.”

“Don't even—”

“Or maybe not. I can't really tell. When we ask her how it's going, she says they're friends.” He leaned back against the headrest. “I've been meaning to have a talk with her,” he said. “You know, another talk. We've had
the
talk with her. There's one you can look forward to.”

“Sometimes, when mommies and daddies love each other very much,” I said.

“It's just lately I've been thinking another talk might be good. I could say something about making sure the kid's literate, that he's kind. That sort of thing.”

“That sounds—”

“But I'm trying to decide: So I go on and do that, buy her a frozen yogurt and sit her down, will she then determine that I'm some kind of world-class jackass and end up on the back of a forty-five-year-old pedophile's Harley, instead of on a mainly harmless college kid's Vespa?”

“It's hard to say,” I said.

“Kid can't be all bad if he drives a powder-blue Vespa, right?”

“Probably not.”

“So maybe this is one of those times where you cut your losses, is what I've been thinking.”

“I don't really know anything about this,” I said, thinking no advice was better than bad.

He said, “It is a cosmic fucking secret, is what it is.”

The way she'd been hanging onto him didn't look at all like the way you'd hang onto a friend, but I did not say so. The hum picked up, got a little louder. A good part of me wanted to get back in line, wait for Jason, pray for those same things all over again, except harder. But somebody else who'd been prayed and washed drove up behind us, hit the horn, and that was it—Mid snapped to, pulled us out onto the road, drove us away in the opposite direction from where Nic and Delton had been headed.