Dance Real Slow (5 page)

“Isn't that something. And where did you get him?”

“My gramma sent it—from Florida.”

“Oh, that's nice,” Mary says, looking at me with a bewildered, inquisitive expression.

“My mother's like that,” I say.

“Does he have a name?”

“Not yet,” says Calvin, guiding his hands evenly along the wire, like it's a steering wheel. “But I'm thinking of one.”

“That's good. A man-o-war's got to have a name.”

Calvin and I start down the hallway, toward my office, but as we get to the door he turns back at Mary.

“It's a Poor'geese,” he says.

“Excuse me?” Mary answers, standing.

“He said it was Portuguese. The man-o-war. It's a Portuguese man-o-war.”

“Oh, I see.”

My office smells of Harper's cigars and I open the
window, as wide as it will raise. I slide my large leather chair, with rollers, around to the front of the room because Calvin likes sitting in it.

“Are you hungry?”

He shakes his head and then climbs onto the chair, trying to pull the jar up behind him.

“No. You'll break it. Leave the man-o-war on the floor.”

His feet rattle toward the ceiling as he leans back deep into the high leather padding of the chair.

“Okay, I'm going to set you up right here,” I say, taking a stubby end table and pushing it to his left. I pull open the drawstring on his gunnysack and set out two coloring books—one of dinosaurs, the other of race cars—a set of crayons and water-base markers, a wooden automobile, a thin hard-covered book about a little fireman, and a stuffed panda bear.

“I'm also putting this here, for when you're thirsty.” I take a tiny apple-flavored-juice box and place it beside his truck.

“Uh, no,” he says, clapping his hands. “I wanna do the straw.”

“All right. I'll just leave it here and you can stick the straw in when you're ready.”

Harper enters and stops behind Calvin, nudging at the chair with his knees. Calvin lets out a whine and looks up, backwards. When he sees that it is Harper, he settles on the chair's arm and bites his upper lip with his lower teeth, fang-like. Harper does the same thing, letting out snorting sounds that Calvin tries to match. It is their mutual greeting.

“You got your brain in that jar?” Harper asks Calvin, smirking.

“Nah.” Calvin is laughing. “It's a man-o-war.”

“Oh, really?”

Harper moves to the side of my desk, slipping a flimsy manila folder onto the blotter.

“Joyce Ives dropped this stuff off after you left yesterday.” He breathes in, and looks again at Calvin. “Does your man-o-war do any tricks?”

Calvin nods. “Watch this.” He turns the jar upside down and the man-o-war rights itself, and then floats to the inverted top.

“Neato.”

“Not neato. Don't do that, Cal. All I need is for that thing to bust open and spill.”

Calvin sulks, pursing his lips and squeezing his eyebrows close until they almost meet.

“What's in here?” I ask Harper, taking the folder and opening it.

“The accident report, along with copies of her last three auto check-ups.”

“Lemme guess, brakes fine three times.”

Harper shrugs and then kneels down near Calvin, tapping at his juice box. “You gonna drink this?”

“Yesss.”

“Well, here,” Harper says, lifting it and preparing to jab the straw through the tiny foil hole. “Let me help you.”

Harper knows Calvin usually likes to do the straw part, and in an instant Calvin is up, tugging at one of Harper's belt loops.

“All right, all right. I'm just foolin'. Here you go.”

Calvin takes the juice, along with his man-o-war, and slinks into a far corner, kicking off his sneakers and knocking them into the center of the room. I leaf through the folder, finding nothing much of interest.

“Zero.”

“I know. Christ, she didn't even need wiper fluid.” Harper steps over Calvin's shoes and back to the door, turning to Calvin before exiting, to shoot him the A-O.K. sign. Calvin covers his eyes with his inner elbow.

“You haven't talked to Joyce yet, have you?” Harper yells from his office.

“I'm saving her for last.”

“Should do it soon.” There is silence, and then Harper says, to no one in particular, “What makes people do these things?”

I have often wondered this myself. The thought seemed most relevant, however, when it concerned my father. One of life's great ironies, as I see it, is that my father was called Happy. Henry “Happy” Nash. He was given the nickname by his high-school basketball coach, who would always tell my father to smile, to at least pretend he was enjoying himself. Personally, I can recall seeing my father smile only four times in the twenty-seven years I knew him. Actually, I only remember three of those times, though I am told that his mouth did raise slightly at the corners after my birth. He grinned—beamed even—twice following basketball games: after a last-second overtime win at Notre Dame (most of this
pleasure derived because Notre Dame would not accept my father when he was matriculating); and following a victory over UCLA for the national championship. The only other time was outside an Italian restaurant in Cleveland. The Eagles had just defeated Northern Illinois and my father and I were meeting my mother for dinner. As we got out of the car, my father took my shoulder and told me to wait by the curb. A stout, well-dressed man was standing in front of a green neon window sign, picking at his teeth with the edge of a business card. His suit was dark and loose-fitting, despite his substantial girth. He wore his tie low, with the top button of his white shirt unfastened. My father walked up and was immediately recognized.

“Hey, Happy. Long time.” The man spoke quickly, in short staccato bursts. “Nice win tonight. Nice win.”

By the time my father got close, I could see what he was going to do. He was going to hit the man. His right fist was clenched, and he reached up with his left hand and grabbed the man's tie, lifting it into his chin. The man pushed awkwardly at my father, trying to slap himself free. But his attempts were lame, almost childlike in their ineffectiveness. My father cocked and slugged the man high on the cheekbone, freeing him from his grip in the same motion. The man dropped to his knees, using the heel of his palm to dab at the spider of blood below his left eye. My father walked back to me and I noticed the knuckles on his hand were all red and puffy. As we headed toward the restaurant, my father told me that when we first moved to Lakeshire, while I
was still an infant, that man had sold us some furniture. His name was Curtis Rhodes, and my father believed he had since left the home-furnishings business to try his hand at insurance. But on my father's second road trip with the Eagles, to Tucson and Salt Lake City, Curtis Rhodes called my mother and asked her out for drinks. She declined, and no matter how sincere Mr. Rhodes's intentions might have been, my father never forgave him. It was as we entered the restaurant, in the glow of the cigarette machine, that I could see my father smiling as he massaged the wrinkled edge of his right index finger.

It is unsettling for a boy to watch his father hit another man. Especially in the street, out in the open. In the moments before, everything moves slowly, like oatmeal. The motions seem contrived, heavy with anticipation. Once the punch is thrown, however, the softness no longer lingers. I could hear the muffled snap as my father slugged Mr. Rhodes and then a lumbersome
whumph!
when Mr. Rhodes collapsed, as if all the air had been pressed from his stomach and lungs. He sat hunched over for several minutes, feeling his face and mumbling in disbelief. The incident only helped smear that slender column between my father's own immortality and his stooped and weighted stature as a common man. An ordinary person. If my father could simply walk up to someone and hit him that easily, that effortlessly, then what was to prevent another man from doing the same to him.

Most of the afternoon I spend sorting through various legal volumes, attempting to find some loophole in Joyce Ives's case. For a moment I sit back and grin: it is such an odd little thing to choose to enter my brain. It was a strange event in the first place, something kindly Kate thought to do years ago—before we divorced, before, even, we married. I had been sick with fever and Kate sat beside me, in bed, blotting my forehead with a cold washcloth. Whenever she moved, I could feel the coarse hair of her legs rake against my hand.

Sometime during the night, delirious, I mumbled into her ear words about a rodeo: a
yellow
rodeo. Early the next morning, Kate asked me about it. I told her that when I was young I had these mysterious dreams: old Western dreams about rodeos where everything—horses, cowboys, fences, six-shooters—was yellow.

That afternoon, Kate woke me with a tray of chicken broth and carrot juice.

“It's on,” she said, talking to a place above my shoulder.

“What? What's on?”

She walked to the television set and turned to a cable sports station showing a tape-delayed broadcast of the national rodeo championships in Omaha. Then Kate propped me against the wall with pillows and slid a pair of paper glasses—the kind people wore for 3-D movies—across the bridge of my nose. Covering the eye slits, though, was yellow cellophane that Kate had stapled at the corners.

“There you go, mister man. A yellow rodeo.”

She fed me soup and then carrot juice, through a
straw, and together we watched a yellow rodeo—each taking turns with the crinkly glasses.

Calvin's day is also spent killing time; he eats his lunch—a peanut butter sandwich, Cheez Curls, and a banana—in the waiting room while leafing through magazines. Mary has shown him the Xerox machine and they make copies of his hands, left cheek, sneakers, and the bottom of the man-o-war jar. As I start to pack my briefcase with things to take home, Calvin steps into the doorway.

“Here,” he says, surrendering one of the Xeroxed copies of his spread-open hands. “Mary said you'd like this.”

“She was right. Come here.”

I lift him onto my lap and lay the paper over a book on my desk. “Why don't you sign it.”

He is still unable to write many things, but he can manage his name with help.

“What color,” I ask, opening his box of markers.

“Red.”

“Okay, red it is.”

“No. Purple.”

“Okay, purple.”

We spell out his name in crooked, wandering purple, with a large C and an I that collides with the N. I take it from him and tape it low on my wall, beside a framed print by a local artist.

“Looks wonderful.”

His chest swells with a tiny pride, and then he loses interest and grabs for his man-o-war. I fill his gunnysack
and walk with him to the doorway, surveying the room one last time for anything we may have forgotten.

“You know somethin',” he says, resting the jar on his feet.

“Hunh?”

“I have a name for my man-o-war.”

“That's great. What is it?”

“I'm gonna name him after Mom.”

A warm, musty shaft of air blows into the room from a vent adjacent to my shins. After a few seconds it stops and Mary yells out an apology, saying she hit the wrong button.

“Hmm,” I say. “I think that's nice. Kate is a beautiful name.”

“No, not Kate. Mom.”

“You want to call your man-o-war Mom?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, Calvin,” I say, setting my briefcase down and squatting on top of it. “That's nice. But—see.” I am not really sure what to tell him, why something like this is not done. I do not have an answer, at least not one that a four-year-old boy will understand. And then it occurs to me if he truly wants to call his man-o-war Mom, that would be just fine.

“Okay. Mom then.”

We sit for a moment in the car before leaving and he takes a blue crayon from his box, turning the immense mason jar between his legs. He marks his personal hieroglyphics on the corner of the label, above the word “man-o-war.” I can make out the letter C and a backward R, but nothing else.

“There,” he says, tongue pawing at the corner of his mouth. “Mom.”

“Mom,” I repeat.

A wiser father, a more compassionate father, might discuss the naming process in further detail with his son: analyze why, of the near-endless supply of names, Calvin selected Mom. However, I am not such a man. Rationalization is raw. It strikes me that in Calvin's tiny brain the notion of naming his dead man-o-war Mom had no more significance than calling it Scott or Beth or Peach or Blue. He does not miss this woman, I tell myself. How could he? The only mother he knows,
really
knows, is Charlotte—and, of course, Moonie the cat.

The sun settles into the horizon, showing only its top half, like some enormous nuclear umbrella. Chalky clouds are rolling in from the west, their undersides black and thick with rain.

“Mom.” Calvin whispers to himself, touching the end of his nose with his index finger.

Mercer Street runs four lanes wide through the center of Tarent, moving east and west. About a half mile outside of town, in both directions, it becomes only two lanes. At its roomiest stretch, Mercer is cradled by buildings of white clapboard and dull, grainy brick, never rising more than five stories high. There is a supermarket with foot-long red Plexiglas letters, mounted directly onto its brick façade, spelling out Stop 'n' Shop. Its windows are thick and grimy, mostly covered with taped-on signs announcing daily and weekly specials on items such as paper towels, canned pinto beans, Tastee Tabby cat food, and lime Popsicles (in season). To one side of the market is an office building that houses a State Farm insurance agency on the ground floor and a chiropractor and a tailor on the second level. Beside that, a men's haberdashery where I have purchased a number of items, including two suits: a dark navy wool and a tan gabardine; several ties; socks; underwear; and a set of braces that I rarely wear.