Ten Year Stretch Read online

  The front step was wide and deep, trimmed in marble of bluish-grey, veined with something between green and silver. I took a deep breath and looked up the street. Maybe there are grander streets than Summit Avenue, bigger homes and larger trees, but there was no street anywhere like that in Ocala, Florida, my town. Sure, Ocala had money: we had orange barons and strip club owners and concrete magnates and jai-alai syndicators and mid-level Mafiosi fixing games at the frontons. We had a few old landowners with spreads by the groves, ranches and missions and seven-column plantation mansions. But this boulevard, the dark stolidity, shaded brick and heavy frames and winter-thickened trees with muscular roots—this home, whose address I had memorized long ago from the Student Directory, was the home Ingrid never talked about. She would mention her family’s lake house up past Duluth, and the ranch in Wyoming, its thousands of acres: these places birthed stories, tales of things she’d seen and snakes that reared and a time she broke her arm. These stories were already sepia-toned as she told them, especially when she reminisced about the hired man named LeeRoy, who was so skilled and so funny, and when he’d had a little to drink would do carnival riding tricks atop the horses, feats of strength and dexterity. LeeRoy had died one day, jumped off a horse and just hit funny, Ingrid said, and five minutes later his heart beat its last and they buried him in the field that he loved.

  Poor LeeRoy, I’d say, and she’d laugh, her eyes rolling back from the yellow Hawaiian weed I splurged on at home and brought up to school for the occasional hour when she would smoke it with me.

  ‘Thousands of acres,’ I’d say, rolling another joint. We had never kissed, but we would, given time. In this I had faith. I was putting in the work.

  ‘Thousands,’ giggled Ingrid Ericsson.

  That poor, funny, deceased hired man. Sometimes it felt like I’d known him too. Maybe, there on the front step, I should have said I had. But instead I told Mrs Ericsson, straight up: ‘Your daughter is the reason I came to Minnesota.’

  Mrs Ericsson reached out and sampled the damp lapel of my blazer between her fingers. The softly lighted foyer glimmered beyond her, what little beyond her I could see.

  ‘She has plenty of friends, and some boys with high hopes,’ she said. ‘You aren’t like them.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  That, Mrs Ericsson did not explain. After barely another minute of discouragement, she excused herself, asking if I knew where the bus stop was. I walked back to Marshall Avenue and caught a bus back across the river.

  St Paul was built on these great avenues running east to west, named for men—the Marshalls, the Daytons, the Jeffersons—whose ambition and energy had run east to west, straight and unbroken. In my Minneapolis neighborhood, all the name streets ran north-south, tight one-way strings in a triangle like an autoharp, tuneless, pinched, in alphabetical order, packed with little Nissans and Mazdas. As if here, men would be less grand, nowhere as grand as the scheme. And even the scheme existed to be hijacked, laid waste by lesser men, men like the one I would become in my interview blazer and tie, if I could ever get somebody to call me back.

  On a Sunday, Waitress had a lot to carry, and sometimes there was a party. That day, bridesmaids. When Curtisall stuck in his head and said, ‘Ice Cream, go out and bus,’ I didn’t complain. I took off my rubber gloves. Bus was cleaning up some disaster in the front window. I headed to the party on the upper level.

  On the upper level, we could seat four fours, three twos on the back wall, the big roundtable which went twelve seats without crowding, and the four enclosed booths along the right wall with their fringes of strange wooden beads. Smoking wasn’t allowed, but on the upper level, everything was smoked. It smelled real up there, like a grandfather’s pipe, like cigars.

  Sunday’s bridesmaids had fanned out wide—over the whole level. Gifts everywhere. I mean, the lucky couple was going to need counter space. All these women would look at home in Ingrid Ericsson’s foyer on Summit Avenue. Pink gums, white teeth, hard calves below the hem: rollerblading till the snow fell, cross-country all winter.

  They were only a couple years older than me, but I didn’t even put on my game face.

  I had a gray tub. Filled it twice and came back. I mean, there were fifteen or sixteen of them. I had to step around all of it: the bridesmaids, the chairs, the extra tables they’d shifted over because Why not? They’d all arrived in jackets, though it was August, and everything they’d shed had to be hung up on chairbacks here, in their presence—none of it could go on hangers down front, on the rack below the carved sign that read Since 1913.

  The moment, looking back, had three parts. The first was the bridesmaids’ final gift.

  The final gift was like some wondrous invention of a century past—a sort of ornamental perpetual motion machine, with ocean-blue marbles scooped up by the tails of a ring of spinning dolphins and flipped to the center, where they rolled out again across a lacquered ocean to the outer rim where the dolphins scooped them again. It made a casino-like clinking and rattling, and the dolphins spun industriously, and who knows what powered it, a battery or a spring or some principle of movement the celebrants had kept from the rest of us, whose motions might by it be someday spared. There were delighted gasps, and I slowed down to watch.

  As the bridesmaids vied, taking pictures, the bride-to-be decided that the last traces of luncheon visible along the table would not do. ‘Would you,’ said the bride-to-be, waving inconveniently below her camera phone, ‘take this?’

  I wasn’t sure what she meant. But I was mannerly about it. ‘Take what, ma’am?’

  ‘This.’ She waved the sort of backhand you use to scoot away a gnat.

  The this was an enormous cut-crystal tray with divots in it, I could only imagine, for five or six dozen devilled eggs. They had not brought it in full of devilled eggs. Instead, the tray had borne their vast white luncheon cake. Coconut frosting, and full of booze—I could smell it from across the room. It complemented the smokiness.

  ‘The tray?’ I said. I wasn’t sure what to do. I’d only been Bus for nine or ten hours—I hadn’t encountered all the permutations. Now all the bridesmaids stared. ‘It isn’t our tray,’ I said.

  You didn’t want to pick up a crystal tray like this one, not on a good day, much less carry it with your gray battle Bus tub through a minefield of purses and chairs and gift bags strewn. And a third of a cake on it, uneaten. A cake as big as triplets.

  Maybe I wasn’t getting it. Maybe my problem was the cake. ‘Your Server can put the cake in a box.’

  The bride turned on me, and now I saw the face her husband would see forever. To be honest, I quailed.

  ‘You don’t want to put a tray like that in the dishwasher,’ I added.

  ‘I just wanted you to move it,’ she steamed, ‘if you’re not too stupid.’ And then the second thing happened. Immediately the beaded curtains on one booth smashed all a-clatter as the one person there clambered up and came out.

  It was the same old guy—vanilla malted, fifty dollars—in the blue suit. He wobbled out past the beads, the hanging light swinging behind the swinging beads, so that suddenly the room became a tiger-rush of light and shadow. He reached out for me, his eyes going big in their sockets.

  But I followed the directions, I thought.

  The nearest rim of bridesmaids seemed to crumble away from him. The old man’s nostrils whistled once, twice, before I understood what the other hand, the one at his clavicles, meant.

  He was choking.

  I dropped the bus tub on top of someone’s purse. I grabbed him, spun him round, slapped my arms around him and found the lowest ribs with my forearms, joined my hands. The lapels of his jacket were damp, curiously hot. He had an old man’s bowl to his belly. But his frame felt so bony, so light.

  No time for conversation. I remembered my first aid training, cinched him in, and clenched upwards.

 
On the very first thrust, a ragged, colorless chunk of something went end-over-end, cleared the bride’s coiffure and disappeared into a gift bag. The old man gurgled and drew air.

  The bridesmaids went silent.

  I let go of the man in the blue suit and asked whether he was all right. He waved his hand, but he didn’t reply, didn’t even look back. With some dignity, he regained his booth, slipping through the beads and taking his place at the table.

  And I just picked up the tub and got as far from that cake as I could.

  I told Curtisall, ‘I don’t think I can go up there again. I just gave some old guy the Heimlich, and the party, they were freaking out.’

  ‘Some old guy? Johnny Bronco?’

  Somehow, in circling to the kitchen with my tub of margarita glasses and cake forks, I’d forgotten that the choking man was Johnny Bronco.

  ‘Stop. Stop, stop,’ said Curtisall, who’d been joking about something with Cook, I hadn’t quite caught what, but I was the joke now. ‘You gave Johnny Bronco a Heimlich manoeuvre? You, like, grabbed him and hugged him? Was he choking?’

  ‘Why do you think I did it?’

  ‘Did he say anything to you?’

  ‘Not a word. He went back in his booth. What kind of name is Johnny Bronco, anyway?’

  ‘It’s a beautiful name,’ Curtisall said.

  ‘I might look old,’ Cook mimicked the old man. ‘But I know how to get through to the youngsters!’

  Cook and Curtisall exchanged a glance.

  ‘You should go home. Right now,’ said Curtisall. ‘I can do Ice Cream. Just—don’t go home. Take twenty dollars and go to the lakes. Take your girl to the lakes.’

  He seemed panicked, so I handed him the Bus tub. Stripped off my Ice Cream smock. The twenty he gave me was a ten.

  It wasn’t even two o’clock. So I went ahead to the lakes. I walked around Lake Calhoun, Lake of the Isles. High school kids throwing a football. Couples were twenty-five, thirty, forty, fifty. I sat for some time, hours, trying to catch the spirit of being twenty-two in Minneapolis, young, single, free, gainfully employed, on my way up to somewhere, something, anywhere. Anything. It was a crisp, bright summer day.

  All I could come up with was: I hated Minneapolis. They all knew each other. I hated the connected lakes, all ten thousand of them. I had come five hundred miles to chase a girl who only talked to me because of my dope. I could see the truth, and it wasn’t much thornier than that.

  There was one thing to do. Get more dope.

  ‘You got a phone call,’ said Bjorn, the youngest of my roommates. For the first day or two, I thought Bjorn and I were going to be friends. He had one of those chin beards that climbs up to tickle the lower lip, inflaming it weird and red, like something you’d uncover petting a guinea pig. He had a collection of records he kept in the living room in open crates, displayed. But when I’d studied them, he said, ‘Is there something I can help you with?’

  ‘Who called?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘Not sure,’ said Bjorn. He was sitting at the table circling jobs in the want ads. He already had a job, but he was always getting a new one. All my roommates had jobs. Rik, Erik, and Henry were all entrepreneurs. One was in telecom, the other in sports foods, I forget which.

  ‘These guys, they’ll fuck you up if you don’t pay on time,’ Bjorn had shared with me, those first days, before the looking-at-the-records thing. ‘By on time, I mean that day, not midnight. Before dinner.’

  ‘So, by six. Six p.m.?’ I’d said.

  ‘If you leave a check in the morning, that would be best,’ said Bjorn. But then I learned he’d been as cruel to the last roommate as anyone. He was the one who struck the match.

  I slept fine. I’d picked up an irksome sunburn, hanging out at the lakes half the afternoon. The next day was Monday and my shift started at eleven. If you ordered ice cream before eleven, you got whatever Cook could make you. Or maybe Dishes.

  Curtisall saw me coming in the door and he slid in beside me and took me to the bar.

  ‘Didn’t you listen?’

  I said, ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’ Curtisall was standing, but I took a stool at the bar, put my elbows up. It was a nice bar, the Northern’s, the best part of the place, old neons glowing in the corners: Grain Belt. Gluek’s. Kato. I couldn’t afford a drink there, but it was nice to sit. The bartender didn’t report till eleven, either, so if you ordered a Manhattan, you got whatever Cook could make you. Or maybe Dishes.

  Curtisall was sniffly. He had a cocaine thing. I didn’t judge. It wasn’t pretty, being a manager.

  ‘I told you never to come back here.’

  ‘You told me to take my girl to the lakes.’

  ‘That means to never come back. I even gave you twenty dollars.’

  ‘I don’t even have a girl,’ I said. ‘You gave me ten. You’re firing me?’

  ‘It’s not that,’ said Curtisall. ‘It’s Johnny Bronco. You never should have touched him.’

  ‘I should have let him choke? What about a thank you?’

  Curtisall dithered with his hands. He reached over the bar, drew out a glass that was mostly clean, and poured me a long drink of red. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Is that sufficient? College boy? Can we move along now? Here are the undisputed facts. You grabbed a gang lieutenant, Johnny Bronco, by the ass.’

  ‘I grabbed him,’ I said, beginning, maybe, to understand. ‘I grabbed him around, and then, I guess, that’s what I did.’

  ‘I don’t need the blow-by-blow. Do you understand that a whole crew of starlets saw you humping the guy?’

  ‘I wasn’t humping him.’

  ‘There are pictures,’ Curtisall said. ‘I know what you think. But no one gives a shit what you think.’

  I opened my mouth, but he had a point.

  ‘Curtisall, how many bridesmaids are there,’ I asked, ‘in a typical wedding?’

  Curtisall shrugged. ‘Maybe four,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t typical.’

  ‘I wasn’t humping him.’

  ‘Kid,’ Curtisall said, and then he poured himself a red too. We drank in silence, him sniffling and dabbing a little at the finish on the bar top, me thinking: Maybe I am a grown-up now. I’d had my first legal drink a year before, my first whiskey with my ex-father at fifteen, my first tequila sick at twelve. But this silence in the bar felt like a debut of sorts.

  Curtisall finished his drink, fumbled the glass into the sink. We both pretended we hadn’t heard it break. ‘Anyway, you should get the fuck out of here. Because—I hate to spell it out for you—but you embarrassed him. He might need to hurt you.’

  ‘To hurt me?’ I said, with an unfortunate chirp.

  ‘You embarrassed him,’ Curtisall said again.

  ‘So you’re not on my side in this. You’re firing me. Can I get paid today then?’

  ‘Friday,’ said Curtisall.

  Four more days. ‘What if I’m not around?’

  ‘We mail it to the address on file,’ Curtisall said.

  ‘If you were a better manager,’ I said, realizing, with one gulp of wine left, that he was conceding me the right to be pissed off, ‘you’d front a kid his week of pay when he gets fired. Because he saved a mobster’s life.’

  ‘I know, Ice Cream,’ Curtisall said. ‘I know.’

  That was the third part of the moment.

  ‘If I’d trained you better,’ Curtisall said, ‘you’d know it: back slaps before the abdominal thrusts.’

  Now I was rubbing at clouds in the varnish too. ‘I went for it.’

  ‘Brave of you.’ He stood and tossed my glass to break beside his in the sink. ‘Now beat it, kid.’

  At the big post office on Thirty-first, I changed my address. You filled in name and particulars on a small, grey form of i
ncalculable cheapness. So cheap and grimy that it felt impossible that anyone would ever read it. Yet the address change form worked. I’d done it twice already that summer, first when I moved from school to Mom’s. My mom and I drove each other nuts for three days, till I got in the Plymouth and didn’t stop till I had found a room just across the river from Ingrid Ericsson and given half my money for first month’s rent.

  Now I rerouted my mail back to my mom’s. There wasn’t much to reroute. But I’d rather she get the check than my roommates.

  I fished out Curtisall’s ten-dollar bill and sat in a woody old bar on Lake that had happy hour all afternoon on Mondays: Special Export drafts, a buck apiece. I drank eight, watched TV. The bartender was named Dolores. Other than that, nothing.

  I thought about taking the bus over to St Paul, throwing myself on the mercy of Ingrid Ericsson’s father—whom I’d never met. But I had no plan to get past that front step. Chasing Ingrid to Minnesota had been my only plan after college, and it wasn’t good. I hadn’t even wound up in the same city.

  Mobsters in Minneapolis. Maybe Curtisall wasn’t kidding. I had the fifty-dollar bill I’d earned for following directions. Maybe that could get me on the first bus, take me down 94 to Chicago. But never all the way back to Ocala.