Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality Page 14

  I wonder if maybe I’ve actually been serious this whole time, too. Because, as much as a Runaway Cockdrama is more Textbook Colonel Hellstache than Gunpowder Gym Shorts (which, ask Toby about that), I’ve tried calling Necro, to tell him about Mindy Fale. Because, that hug from Mindy Fale? I turn that hug into gasoline. I ride that hug into the ground for all it’s worth. So you’d think his Necro Doppler Natecast Sense would be blowing fuses right now, the way how, whenever something good is happening to one of us, whenever Holy Grail Points are being earned, we can detect it from across the city. So there’s a part of me that still wonders: What has he been doing?

  So I put on my flip-flops and get into Toby’s car. We drive to the stiff grass and Camaros that make up Brockport. Because now that I think about it, I could stand to see Toby try to walk into whatever White Power Dungeon Bambert L. Tolby’s presiding over, get into a few fights, see him and some Weapons of Mankind trolls swing their stomachs at each other. Combine that with Frank Sinatra songs, and you pretty much have the mood I’ve been in.

  Except, when we get to the house in question, all these cars are parked on the sides of the streets. The house is this one-floor, sweat-stain-yellow thing with white window shutters on a block with basketball hoops and driveways that are long and flat enough to serve as makeshift half-courts. Three floodlights make a dome in the house’s front yard. Meat hisses on a grill. Two lines of teenagers face each other and take turns doing running-man dance moves, in that way church kids love to dance. Adults in the lit, open garage gesture calmly and eat hamburgers and hot dogs held in napkins.

  Toby and Lip Cheese get out and stare. Their faces? Round and mopey, like planets that were too dumb to get into the solar system.

  “This was the address it said it was,” Toby says to somebody.

  A man with a sunken chest under a pink plaid dress shirt, backlit in the floodlight, walks up to us. He’s shorter than me, shorter than most women, thin and muscley as a lead guitarist. There’s no chinfat on him. His eyes and forehead are huge, with a gray buzz cut and skin as tan as pottery.

  “Are you gentlemen from church?” the man says. His voice is like a mousse, like Casey’s Top 40 putting me to bed on Sunday nights when I still listened to PXY.

  And Toby suddenly, like a kid who just rang somebody’s doorbell, says: “Is Andrea here?”

  The man claps his hands together. “I am afraid he just left. There is, I’d venture, a forty percent chance of his return. But if you know Andrea, you know me. I’m Bambert Tolby, and I’m an honest boring buy on New Year’s.”

  He doesn’t so much smile as show us his upper and lower gums.

  “It’s a twist on a news quote, from a childhood friend, describing a very famous investor. We’ll get you caught up. Shake my hand already! I’m hosting a fundraiser.”

  “Nate,” I say. His handshake is strong but unintimidating in this dadlike way, like he’s capable of giving really sheltering hugs, if things ever came to that.

  “The Nate?” he pauses, like he’s narrating War of the Worlds. “Could it be that I am beholding the legendary? Pants-and-Nintendo, the Condor Wrap? I feel like I know. I feel like I was there for those conversations. What was that? ‘Are you an adult? I—’ The punch line escapes me.”

  “I’ve been tried as one.” Which, I totally stole that joke from Get a Life, or The Simpsons maybe, and have just been carrying it around with me.

  “Bah!” Bambert snaps his fingers. “That’s it! I was close. Anyway, that’s a welcome addition to the community quotables repertoire—we’re all about community here.”

  But if I can Bring the Funny to Bambert, and Bambert can Bring the Funny to Necro, there is no way I’m giving away where I got that joke from.

  “And I take it this is Toby?” Bambert says. “Hambone Toby Winter? Breaker of a Thousand Quarterbacks’ Necks.”

  And since Hambone is the only nice nickname Toby’s ever had, Toby shivers, like kindness just shot up his spine.

  “And a knuckle-cruncher of a handshake,” Bambert says, flexing his fingers after shaking Toby’s hand. “You know, I should have you talk. I just had a conversation with the Gates-Chili district athletic director, and he told me they are hoping to fill an assistant coaching position for the fall. And how about you, Nate? What’s new on your job front?”

  I scan my brain for a grown-up way to respond: “It’s slow going.”

  He raises his eyebrows and sighs. “I am surprised and not surprised. We’ve been a Kodak and Xerox town for so long that Rochesterians have forgotten how to network. We’ve forgotten how to engage—or, let me amend that—entrepreneurialize. I’ll pull the ear of my contact at Ascentek. They’re a recruiter on East Ave. Very cool companies they’re working with. Start-ups, entry-level sales.”

  So it goes on like this: me, fine dining on compliments and overall really polite conversation. Bambert turns to Lip Cheese, who’s wiping his mouth, scratching his scalp. “Everyone pretty much calls me Lip Cheese,” Lip Cheese says.

  “The smart one,” Bambert says.

  “Wait—what?”

  Inside Bambert’s house, soda bottles and bowls and casserole pans crowd the space on the kitchen table, plastic wrap peeled off the tops of pasta bowls and bunched up. Each room is painted a different color—a deep red or a wet-concrete gray. In the living room, there’s a single leather recliner and bulky, refrigerator-sized plasma-screen TV. On the floor, dust bunnies glide across a large, unoccupied space, where maybe a couch or coffee table was recently removed.

  Which Lip Cheese squints at for a second, and Bambert pivots over quickly and tugs on his sleeve: “How about let me show you the basement?”

  The basement is brightly lit, with bare sheetrock and carpets thrown over the floor. There are empty weapons racks and hook-like holders bolted to the walls. Propped up in the corner, on the floor, is a single hatchet with some Japanese logo on the blade. There are two metal-framed futons.

  “I used to keep weapons,” Bambert says. “We were just off-loading some inventory. Sit, sit.”

  He keeps looking at Lip Cheese. “How’s your friend? Andrea visited him and said he’s thinking sharp.”

  “He beat me at Connect Four,” Toby says.

  “What wonderful news, wonderful.” Bambert leans back and folds his hands. “Maybe Andrea told you: I tried to open a weapons store in Webster, and there was this fire there. I do many things—a real multihyphenate. But after my insurance claim was denied”—Bambert looks upward—“that, right there, was a sign that maybe I should devote my full attention to what I’ve always wanted to do: generate community and housing reinvestment strategies and promote ideal-exchange thereof—like a local Habitat for Humanity with an addendum that we also promote artistic and futurist thinking. These people here tonight—churchgoers, real estate developers, donors, the local elites. There’s some real pull, in that front yard. You are among the giving.”

  Bambert keeps looking at Lip Cheese, who squats down and touches the flat of the hatchet blade. “So!” Bambert’s chin flicks upward. “You taking a helicopter to Paychex yet? Company car?”

  I totally get ready for Lip Cheese to rain stutters and saliva. But instead he goes: “Well? My supervisor finally ended the relationship with my staffing agency and brought me on as a full-time employee—I’m sure they don’t miss the fees. Generally they’ve got me reviewing payroll forms, following up with clients if they forget to give us somebody’s Social; putting out fires when we process a check for 350 hours in the week as opposed to 35, things like that.”

  I look at Toby, because how is Lip Cheese’s office talk not directly in Toby’s wheelhouse? Except Toby, too, is leaning forward this whole time, forearms on his thighs, holding eye contact with Bambert and settling his face into a frown like he’s talking business.

  “And Hambone Toby Winter, you’re bred right here in Rochester?” Bambert says.

  Toby wipes some flattery sweat off the side of his nose. “Actually, England, man,
England,” he says, in this corporate-casual tone that I’m totally sure he uses all the time at American Canning Co. “Born in England, but only for a second.”

  England!!?! I clench my chest to keep from cracking up. “My grandparents had my dad in Bury, England,” Toby says. “And my grandmother raised my dad in England, while Grumpiss went to America for a few years after the Lever brothers worked out this deal to build their office in—what, Nate.”

  I throw up my hands and look at Bambert, who recrosses his legs. As a last resort, I look at Lip Cheese, but he also crosses his legs at me.

  “Come on,” I say. “England?”

  “Grumpiss worked for the contractor that constructed Lever House in Manhattan in the 1950s, Nate,” Toby says. “It’s a city landmark. And years later, my dad, back in England, met my mom, and they had me. I was hardly even born yet when Grumpiss helped my dad get a job in the Lever soap factory in Philadelphia, unloading the copra.”

  I literally slap my knee. “I’m sorry. It’s the soap. I mean—”

  Bambert folds his arms, makes a chinrest with his thumb and index finger. So if Toby and Lip Cheese are going to ball-hog the compliments, then Perhaps a Decree is in Order, to Turn This Titanic of Conversation Back Into the Darkness, said Cunnahos, the ruler who burned his children.

  “So Toby and Lip Cheese wanted to figure out what Necro does when he comes here,” I say.

  Bambert chuckles in this hazelnut, Christmas-special way. “He does lots of things. He’s drawn up a few flyers, done a few mass mailers, he worked on producing an introductory video explaining what we do. I met him and his dad at a parks department meeting, of all places, earlier last year. He cares about the area. But mostly, all me and Andrea are, are two renegade lunatics who played Magic before you got here.”

  “Because it’s funny,” I say. “Lip Cheese was thinking Andrea was buying chemicals under fake names. Like Timothy McVeigh’s storage.”

  But before Toby and Lip Cheese can schedule a primetime begging contest for me to unsay that, something pinkens in the tanness of Bambert’s forehead.

  “Right now, gentlemen, Andrea and myself want to get interesting ideas and sustainable housing innovations on the table. I’m not interested in spinning yarns, or the implication inherent in denial. We’re interested in the study by the Boston Fed that found rampant discrimination in housing lending practices. We’re interested in neighborhoods that need these initiatives. Neighborhoods want residencies for people like Andrea, and neighborhoods get angry when city paperwork holds them back. That’s why Interesting Ideas is this organization’s name.”

  “Is that part of Interesting Films?” Lip Cheese says.

  Bambert’s Adam’s apple turns over. His pupils retreat into his eyes. His lower lip forms two or three words before he says, hoarsely, like he swallowed an ice cube: “E-excuse me, what was that?”

  “Your film company,” Lip Cheese says. “You made some movie, and some Retargers of Retargery charged you with stealing their money and said you made some racist movie?”

  Bambert narrows his brow at Lip Cheese, looking for secret codes. He appears to find what he’s looking for and resets his face.

  “Right. Transparency. Didn’t remember the name of my own company for a second!” He shakes his head and laughs through his nose. “The smart one! Now, look. At the most, in my life, I merely dipped my toes into White Power. I had friends, who I’d long ago lost touch with, who put commas between their first and last names as a linguistic maneuver to ward off the IRS. I had friends who would listen only to vocal recordings by a eunuch in Switzerland because that was the only music they could listen to that was cleansed of non-white influence. But my movie was not hateful. My movie was supposed to be a futuristic send-up of the German propaganda during the war. The problem is, when someone gives you money, for anything, it becomes work. I got as far as the poster.”

  He pulls a cardboard tube out from under the basement stairwell and unrolls a poster inside. The title says LETTERS TO GOD AND THE THIRD REICH. In the foreground, the poster shows a younger, military-uniformed Bambert Tolby, with blacker hair, standing on a beach, sneering angrily into the distance, and carrying a laser rifle in one hand and, in the other a dead soldier wrapped in the German flag. The slightly faded faces of different characters float in a Mount Rushmore-like cluster in the background: a fresh-faced soldier with a cigarette in his ear and a smirk; a Native American with a feather headdress; and, then, this gremlin-like creature with butterfly wings.

  “And,” he continues, “when it becomes work, you ask yourself, do you really want to continue this project? Do you even like this project anymore? When I asked myself that last question, suddenly I could no longer create—” He puts a pause around that word to let it get fatter. “I would go home at night after shooting a chase scene in the parking lot of Wegmans, pace around my house, and say ‘I need to kill myself!’ over and over again. ‘God it’s so bad!’ That’s when I knew I had to quit White Power. I was so embarrassed about that movie I used the money that all those generous and stupid people gave me to travel to Africa. I have two million Zimbabwean dollars left from that trip. And when I returned, when the court sentenced me, I needed to let myself be punished—to end that part of my life. Relationships end. I’ve grown, Andrea’s grown, even since I met him. Sometimes the only way to accomplish a goodbye is through violent expulsion. It’s interesting you bring up McVeigh, an Upstate New Yorker himself, who, after all, said goodbye to whoever he had left as friends by destroying a federal building.”

  A finger stabs up into my brain: “Wait. What do you mean?”

  Toby and Lip Cheese have no reaction. Bambert leans back and recrosses his legs.

  “After McVeigh left this area, left town forever, he journeyed, some said shiftlessly, into the small towns of the country and desert. In transition, he sent back some sixty-six letters to a childhood friend of his. The sixty-sixth was sent the summer before the Oklahoma City bombing. In its twenty-three pages, McVeigh, already very lonely or at least isolated, explained that he was ending their friendship, which had been poisoned irreparably by their political differences. ‘Blood will flow in the streets,’ he wrote at one point. ‘Good versus evil. I pray it is not your blood, my friend.’ Just like this,” Bambert snaps his fingers. “Farewell old friend. I’m off to blow up a building.”

  Bambert stands up and dusts off his thighs. Conversations from upstairs turn hearable again. “Well on that upbeat note, gentlemen, we should get back. I am sure my guests are awaiting you and they don’t even know it yet.”

  We follow him up the white-painted staircase, wooden with no support beams between the floor and the top. Light re-enters my head. I realize I’ve been picking at the corner of my pinky nail until it’s frayed into three or four mini layers.

  Bambert leads us past the people in the kitchen and living room, who stand around holding small plastic wine cups and paper snack plates.

  “I don’t know if Andrea’ll be back, but you guys stay as long as you like,” Bambert says, and he wanders into the front yard under the floodlights.

  In the front yard, more people are here than when we showed up: collared shirts, khaki shorts, Docksiders and no socks, shadows in the floodlight stretching to the road. More people have joined whatever dancing game the church kids are playing, and it becomes clear that Necro’s not coming.

  So Toby shrugs, opens the cooler next to the front door, and scoops a can of Surge floating in the ice water. And so we spend the evening wandering around a total stranger’s front yard. Some lady with tiny shoulders, a paisley vest over a short-sleeve shirt and gray, mushroom-shaped hair introduces herself to Lip Cheese. As tax law changes, we’re always adapting, I overhear Lip Cheese say. Toby drifts toward the grill, positioned at the garage-end of the driveway, and shakes hands with a man who is dressed like a golfer. People walk by me. Toby assumes grill duty, pressing hamburgers with the flat of the spatula; checking blood color; opening up hamburger buns
and setting them on the warming rack, serving them on paper plates.

  “But the screw threads were all English standards,” Toby maybe tells the man. And it annoys me that I can’t get talked to even among the nicest people, and that Toby and Lip Cheese, maybe, haven’t so much been pretending to be grown-up as: This is how they act when we aren’t around one another.

  And my brain, for a second, darts in a direction I don’t mean it to, and I think about the Evening with Raw Dog, and then I wonder if, maybe, Bambert L. Tolby this whole time has been lying to us.

  Someone grabs my forearm. “Quick! Will you be the new person?” a bulky girl in a Brockport High soccer uniform says.

  Have I ever danced before? Maybe probably not. But the girl leads me into the two lines of church kids dancing. In the yard, on a wooden chair, there’s a radio, and she presses Play, and the disco-y Jamiroquai song that plays sounds extra loud and tinny, like it might give the radio a nosebleed.

  The teenagers around me do the Charleston and assorted chicken-wing dances, throwing themselves hard into the moves, like they’ve been practicing, during homework nights, for this exact situation. I bend my knees a little. I feel the weight of the fat in my arms. And, just in case Toby and Lip Cheese see me, I grab my ankle and swing my knee back and forth so I can look like I’m actually totally ripping on all these people. But I figure out very quickly that the knee-swing is funny only once, and I can never use it again.

  The girl presses Stop. I stand on my left foot, holding my right foot behind me. Some of the younger kids look at each other and giggle. I squint one last time at all of these people and relax my arms, cram all my energy into my left leg, and settle in. The last one of us not to fall wins.

  PARIS GREEN

  But then, the Saturday before the Fourth of July, I drink some of Mom’s Sam Adamses and type in NecronicA. The white screen scalds my eyes: “VivaWeb cannot find page,” the screen says. I refresh. Same message.