Moose made the introductions. Jim Teeter. My niece. “We went to high school together,” he told Charlotte in an ironic, quizzical tone that came across as obnoxious, but in fact meant her uncle was uneasy.
“Your niece,” Teeter said. “She better be older than she looks.”
Her uncle frowned; Charlotte sensed the comment landing in his mind with an unpleasant weight. “I just wanted a Coke,” she rushed to assure the barman. “We just came in to get out of the rain.”
“One Coke,” Teeter said. “How about you, Moo-man?”
Moose winced at the epithet. “Beer,” he said. “Whatever you’ve got.”
“Old Style do you?” Teeter was already pulling the tap. “So where you been all this time?”
“I teach history over at the college,” Moose said, with great effort. “I’m married for the second time.”
“How many kids?”
“None, actually.”
Teeter glanced at Moose, then slid the beer and Coke across the thickly varnished bar. Moose lifted the glass to his mouth with trembling hands. Charlotte had forgotten how ill at ease he was with other people. “Do you have kids?” she asked Teeter, anxious to lift the burden of conversation from her uncle.
“Three,” he told Moose, sounding downcast. “Wife’s looking out for number four. Guess I’m supposed to plant a money tree out back.” Moose said nothing, just rested his eyes on the ballgame. “Economy’s gang-busters, right?” Teeter went on. “Every day you got a new millionaire. Guess I forgot to pick a number.”
“Tell me about it,” Moose said suddenly. “I’m driving a ’seventy-eight station wagon.”
“Mine’s an ’eighty-two,” Teeter cackled. “Green, looks for absolute shit.”
“Mine’s blue,” Moose said, and grinned. “With paneling.”
“No way, aw shit! You got me on that,” Teeter cried, and they laughed together with a kind of relief. Then Teeter said, “Look at us, right? Thirty years later and so what.”
Moose seemed taken aback; Charlotte felt him straining to grasp Teeter’s meaning. Finally, with deliberation, he said, “If you’re talking about high school, we graduated twenty-three years ago.”
“Twenty, thirty.”
Moose downed the last of his beer and planted the heavy glass against the bar. “Right,” he said in a tight voice. “So what.”
“You oughta order up some soup. It’s cats and dogs out there.”
“Let’s sit,” Charlotte suggested. She wanted to get her uncle away from Teeter and farther into the bar. She was the only female in the room excepting the waitress, a middle-aged lady in skirt and sneakers, pink lipstick bleeding into a barbed wire of creases around her mouth. The density of men roused in Charlotte an unfamiliar sensation of girlishness; she felt like girls in the lunchroom at East, their breasts and bracelets and feathery hair folded around them like the leaves of a tree. She felt this now about her glasses, the wet tips of her hair. The amber bead, which she fished from inside her sweater and let dangle between the lapels of her raincoat. As she led the way to an empty table, her gaze locked with that of a young black man seated across the room, and she smiled at him.
The waitress arrived with battered menus and a second beer for Moose. Charlotte wiped her glasses and left them off, letting the room cave in around her. “So, you and Teeter were at East together?” she ventured.
“Yes,” Moose said dully. The encounter had drained him. “We played football, both of us.”
“Did you win a lot?”
There was a pause. “We won the state championship. My junior year.” And now he smiled, unexpectedly.
“Wow,” Charlotte breathed, imagining it—those long halls at East, everyone cheering him. “That must’ve been like being God.”
“I guess it was,” Moose said, and he smiled again. “God of a fishpond. God of a lily pad. Of course,” he added, “you think it’s the universe.”
The waitress brought his beer and Moose ordered another on the spot. “And then what happened?” Charlotte asked.
He took a long sip. “I opened my eyes,” he said. “I opened my eyes and it disappeared. Pop.”
He’d never said anything like this before. “It sounds scary,” Charlotte said.
“Terrifying.” He was looking right at her. “Terrifying, but beautiful, too. Because my head was clear.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty-three. I was sitting by the interstate, looking down. For no reason. I pulled over for no reason.”
He was watching her with eyes so bright and distinct that Charlotte saw them clearly even without glasses. Moose took her hand in his. Hot. She had never touched her uncle’s hand before, or any part of him. “Charlotte,” he said, softly but with great urgency, “I need you to concentrate. I need you to think very, very carefully. Will you do that for me? There’s so little time!”
What do you mean? she wanted to ask. So little time for what? But the part of her that monitored her behavior with Moose, eliding all evidence of incomprehension, censored the query.
“But Uncle Moose,” she said, leaning close, glancing in Teeter’s direction, “how did you change from being like that, to now?”
It was the question she had always wanted to ask, the question everyone wanted to ask—her mother most of all. What had happened? Moose clutched her hand. Charlotte felt the tension in her uncle as he struggled to make an answer.
The table joggled slightly, startling Moose so he flinched, nearly upsetting their drinks. Instantly he released Charlotte’s hand. She looked up and saw the black man she had noticed before squeezing past their table toward the exit. He smiled at her in recognition. Disoriented, Moose fixed a resentful and suspicious eye on the man as he moved past. Meanwhile, the man’s friend, a freckled redhead who was following behind, planted himself in front of their table and waited for Moose to meet his gaze. “You got a problem with Pete?” he said.
“No, I don’t have a problem,” Moose said, in his mocking, nervous voice. “What kind of problem would I have?”
“I got no idea. Maybe you’re racial.”
“Come on, Allen,” Pete called back through the crowd. “Say we rock and roll here.”
Moose and Allen eyed each other with lush, expectant hostility.
“He can’t seem to tear himself away from our table,” Moose said loudly, though whether he was speaking to Charlotte, to Pete, or to Allen, his new enemy, was not clear.
“Take your eyes and put ’em someplace else,” Allen instructed Moose.
“You want a ride, Al? ’Cause I’m outta here.”
“What choice do I have, with you looming over my table like some weird dirigible?” Moose asked.
A silence was falling over the room in gentle phases, as if a speech were about to begin. Charlotte didn’t know what “dirigible” meant, but the longer the word hung there, the worse it sounded. “Uncle Moose,” she said, and touched his sleeve. He didn’t notice.
Moose rose from his chair, a terrible energy coming off him like heat. He was bigger than Allen, but Allen looked stronger, white freckled arms dangling like wrenches from the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt.
Suddenly Teeter was fluttering in their midst. “Whoa, hey, come on kids,” he said cheerfully. “You gotta play nice in here, that’s the rules. I don’t want no trouble.” When no one responded, he slung a collegial arm around Moose’s shoulders. “C’mon, Moo-man. Aren’t you getting kinda old for this shit?”
Moose sloughed Teeter off with a single shudder of impatience. “I’m getting extremely tired,” he told him, in a quiet, menacing voice, “of having you tell me how old I am.”
Teeter went red, and Allen turned to him. “You know him?” Indicating Moose.
“Sure do,” Teeter said sourly. “Stolt my girlfriend in high school. Then he cracked up, if I heard right. Set off a bomb or some such hoo-ha.”
Moose punched Teeter in the face so abruptly, with such unequivocal force that the bartender som
ersaulted backward over a table and clattered to the floor without having uttered a sound.
“No!” Charlotte screamed as several men jerked toward her uncle, a band of anger contracting around him. “Stop!” And then she was plucked from their midst—Pete yanked her out of the way and seized her shoulders to keep her from running back in. “Nothing you can do …” he murmured, “… gotta play itself …”
Moose lunged heedlessly, longingly into the violence, lobbing punches at Allen’s face and stomach so the redhead fell, holding his eye, then flinging blows at two or three other men, cuffing them away almost playfully, filling the air with the rusty stench of their blood. He was riotous, free, joyful as Charlotte had ever seen him—as if the excitement she’d felt building in her uncle these past weeks had at last found its perfect expression.
By now, Teeter had heaved himself to his feet. He swiped dirt from his legs and arms with studied indignation, then came at Moose, fast and mean, kneeing him in the gut and dislodging a groan. Moose doubled over. And now the others set upon him ravenously, too many to one, some holding his arms, others assailing his bulk with fists and feet so that each time Moose tried to stand, another blow crumpled him. Charlotte flailed in Pete’s grasp, but he clamped her shoulders down as she watched her uncle slide to the floor, screaming, “No! No!” certain he would die, until finally she did twist free, writhed like a newt from Pete’s hands and thrust her skinny way into the fighters’ midst. She draped herself over the prone heap of her uncle, begging, “Stop! Please! Leave him alone,” but she couldn’t cover all of Moose, he was far too big and they were still kicking him, getting in where Charlotte couldn’t stop them, until Allen went for Moose’s head and Charlotte blocked his boot with her wrist.
The pain made her shriek, knocking tears from her eyes. And that stopped it. The men stood back. Charlotte heard Pete, “… it’s done, just let it go …” talking to the others the way she’d heard people whisper into horses’ ears to calm them. The pain in her wrist nauseated her, and she held very still, trying not to be sick.
Her uncle felt dead beneath her, mountainous, insensate. Charlotte’s uninjured hand was still cupping his head, the chaotic tangle of his hair, his blue-white cheeks. “Oh, God,” she kept saying. She was afraid to get up, to leave him exposed. “Oh, my God.”
“Shhh. He’s gonna be fine,” Pete said, and pried her off Moose. Allen and the other brawlers had slunk ineffably away, back into the crowd at the bar, or outside. Teeter, his eye socket already going gray, carried ice packed in a towel and held a few cubes to the back of Moose’s neck until he stirred. Then Teeter and Pete together hoisted Moose off the floor and propped him in a chair, where he drooped semi-conscious, blood running from his nose, one eye swollen almost shut. Teeter stuck the towel full of ice in Moose’s hand, bent Moose’s arm and pressed the ice pack to his swollen eye. He gathered the stray pieces of ice and held them to his own.
Charlotte knelt at her uncle’s side. Already she was calmer; he wasn’t dead, and he wasn’t going to die. “If you give me Aunt Priscilla’s number,” she said softly, “I’ll call her at work.”
“No,” he said sharply. “Don’t.”
“But you’re—”
“No.”
They sat for a very long time, Moose draped in the chair, Charlotte kneeling helplessly beside him while the bar lapsed into willful amnesia, erasing the fight until Charlotte herself could hardly believe it had happened. Pete had gone and Teeter was behind the bar again, black eye and all, pulling the tap. The White Sox scored and everyone clapped. Charlotte felt exiled, heart chattering in her chest, wrist throbbing in her lap.
When Moose was strong enough, they left the bar and walked back through the Water Power District to his station wagon, still parked on Main Street beside the bridge over Kent Creek. The sky was beginning to clear, pink fingers of sunset nudging the dark clouds. “Should I drive?” Charlotte said, amazed at the sound of her calm. She felt scared, strange.
“No,” he said. “I’m fine.”
She crawled inside his station wagon, pushing aside the old coffee cups and pizza containers that seemed to reclaim the seat each time she left it. Moose started the car and they sat, engine running. A thick, guilty silence packed the car, as if they’d gotten in some awful trouble together, as if it were Charlotte’s fault, too. I did something wrong, she kept thinking, and felt a queasy shame. Her wrist ached.
“Charlotte, if you wouldn’t mind,” Moose said at last, stiffly, “I’d prefer you not mention any of this to your mother.”
“My mother,” she said, stung. “I don’t tell her anything.”
Chapter Fifteen
When the ushers arrived with their brooms and trash bags and rousted Michael West from his seat, he repaired to the crowded lobby and idled there, gazing at the synthetic red carpet, inhaling salty lungfuls of artificial butter smell while around him moviegoers coursed from other theaters and dispersed. Watching movies left him weak, porous to the world in a way that felt hazardous, as if his skin had been removed. Usually he waited for the feeling to pass before venturing outdoors. It was almost dark, a groggy smudge of pink beyond the shaded windows, puddles of rain suspended on the asphalt.
“Michael?”
A tumble-haired woman in a raincoat: Abby Reece. Michael wondered how long she’d been standing there. “Are you waiting for someone?” she asked.
He smiled, adjusting. “No, I’m just—hanging around. Killing time, I guess.”
They had avoided each other at school for many months—or rather, she had avoided him. Michael looked at her sad gray eyes and tried to remember what exactly had happened between them.
“Which movie did you see?” she asked, a bit nervously, and he told her the name. “Any good?”
“I had a mixed response,” he said. “I liked the basic premise of a man who plunders deep-sea wreckage for treasure, but I thought Tom Cruise seemed too kind to seize gems from the skeletal necks of the drowned. I did enjoy his conflict with the salvage operation, and I thought Jennifer Aniston was an unlikely but interesting choice for his adversary and eventual lover. Of course their discovery of a fully furnished bedroom two hundred meters below the sea was preposterous.”
Abby nodded, studying him, and Michael wondered if he’d gone on too long. He’d had little practice discussing movies with other people, though nowadays he consumed them heedlessly, rapturously—the moment school ended, after a faculty dinner; all day, sometimes, on weekends. Even the poorly made ones kicked him open effortlessly, invading him with their light and motion and noise, their burning planes and sinking ships and couples destined to find one another and marry after a designated number of hilarious mishaps. He’d become a connoisseur, a seasoned arbiter of car chases and court-martials and crises aboard 747s, a discerning appraiser of talking animals, of drug busts and fistfights and tearful reconciliations, sex scenes, death throes, and simulated high-speed travel in outer space.
“I was going to grab a bite to eat,” he told Abby. “Will you join me?”
At the sound of the horn, Charlotte ran from her house and plunged into the melty backseat of Roz’s father’s Park Avenue, a vaporous tank of hair-spray, sour candy, body heat—the smell of her friends—a lost, familiar smell that enfolded her like bathwater the precise temperature of her body. Roselyn twisted around and blew her a kiss. In the backseat, Laurel hugged her tightly. Only Sheila, twitching the radio dial, failed to acknowledge her entrance.
“Whawhawha,” Roz said, slapping Sheila’s hand away. “I like Oasis.”
“Hi, Sheila,” Charlotte said, eyeing her friend’s slumped shoulders and pale blond hair. She was eating Rollos.
“What happened to your arm?” Laurel asked Charlotte.
“I fell off my bike.”
Her wrist had been so sore by the time her uncle dropped her at home late that afternoon that she’d actually shown it to her mother, who examined it carefully. Just a bruise, she thought, but if it was worse tomorrow they
would drive to Rockford Memorial for an X-ray. She swaddled Charlotte’s forearm in an Ace bandage, whose pressure relieved the pain. Ricky was having dinner at the home of his new—his first—girlfriend, Allison Jones. Charlotte had planned on going to Michael West’s tonight; she nearly always did, after seeing Moose. But doing her homework she felt restless, anxious. Strange. Her uncle kept raiding her thoughts, flinging ecstatic punches, then buckling to the floor, spent. She found herself calling her friends for the first time in weeks. They were at Roselyn’s, all three, getting ready for a party. “Please,” Charlotte told them. “I have an urgent need to be kidnapped.”
Now she said again, “Hi, Sheila.”
Laurel began hissing into Charlotte’s ear, “… was supposed to visit her dad in New York but he canceled at the very last minute pluswhich now her mom’s selling the—”
Sheila swooped around, her lovely face grimed with fury. “Don’t tell my shit to her!”
“Her,” Charlotte retorted, indignant. “Who’s her?”
Sheila turned back around and ate another Rollo.
“You’re so dark,” Roselyn scolded Sheila. “It’s like, callous.”
“Sorry,” Sheila said, with hostility. “Just because she has five minutes to spend, we’re supposed to like fall on the ground with happiness?”
Michael and Abby drove in separate cars to Chili’s, where they faced each other across a slab of varnished table and ordered frozen margaritas. The food arrived sizzling on black cast-iron trays, and Michael set upon his ravenously. He’d grown fond of Chili’s; the enormity of the portions, the sense that there would always be more regardless of how much one ate—even the predictability of the food instilled in him a deep comfort. He’d developed a monstrous new appetite; it had driven him back to McDonald’s many times, where the cheap food stuccoed his insides, plugging the holes of his hunger. He’d eaten at Burger King and Wendy’s and Arby’s and Taco Bell, had drunk nondairy shakes that were said to contain flour, gobbled onion rings, chicken nuggets, fish sandwiches, synthetic ice cream, until all that remained of his old revulsion was a slight frisson of wickedness as he gorged himself. A new layer of softness had begun to float above his bones where once the skin had stretched tight. Not fat, but a harbinger of fat. He would stand before the mirror and study this new stratum of himself, a widening and settling in his face that amounted to natural disguise. Soon he would begin to exercise, jogging along manicured sidewalks, huffing among rows of tulips, running in circles and then straining to lift hundreds of pounds of weights, cultivating muscles that would adhere to him like expensive clothing. And then his infiltration would be complete.