Mosquitoland(45)

When Beck scanned the room, he found the man sitting on a barstool, eating pie, “as if nothing had happened.” (“Nothing will happen,” he says, his voice thick. “Nothing you don’t want.”)

Beck walked calmly to the bar.

Tapped the man on the shoulder.



“AND I PUNCHED him. Twice. In front of a cop.”

“What?”

Beck adjusts the focus of his camera, goes back to taking pictures while he talks. “It actually ended up turning out okay. The cop was this gung-ho idiot starved for action.”

“Randy. With the huge head?”

“Yeah, you know him?”

“Sort of. No, not really. It doesn’t matter, go on.”

Beck raises an eyebrow and scans through the photos he just shot. He hasn’t met my eyes for a while now, and I wonder if there’s something he’s not telling me. There are only so many angles a person can get of rain on a windshield.

“Officer Randy interrogated us,” he says, “and pretty much sorted it out. I got a lifetime ban from Greyhound for fighting, and spent my last few dollars at a Red Roof Inn in Union last night. They called me in this morning for some follow-up questions, then turned me loose.”

“And what about Poncho Man?”

Beck stops taking pictures, but doesn’t look at me. “How’d you know he was wearing a poncho?”

I hear my mother’s voice in my ear. Tell him. “I just—I remember him. I remember a creepy-looking guy, is all. In a poncho.”

Beck takes a second before he answers my question. “He’s in jail.”

“They arrested him?”

“Had to. The little girl spoke up.”

I look out at the rain and think back to the flashing blue lights in the parking lot of Jane’s Diner. I knew I wasn’t his first. And if I’m honest with myself, I knew I wouldn’t be his last.

But I could’ve been.

I could have said something. I could have saved that little girl myself, made it so it never happened. But my Objective had come first. And now—because of me—some little girl will never be the same.

I slip on Albert’s aviators and let the tears come, hard and heavy. Life can be a real son of a bitch sometimes, bringing things back around long after you’ve said good-bye. Not only am I selfish, I’m a coward. That little girl spoke up. She did what I couldn’t do.

She did what you wouldn’t do, Mary.

“We should go,” says Walt out of nowhere.

Honestly, I’d forgotten he was even here. I look at him—he’s wide-awake, smiling like a kid on Christmas morning—and fight the urge to throw my arms around his neck, just kiss his cheeks for all of eternity.

Beck looks at me quizzically, then back at Walt. “Go where, buddy?”

“To the game,” Walt says, turning up the radio.

“. . . and now that the rain has finally stopped, I can’t imagine a more perfect day at the ballpark. So once again, if any listeners are interested, we still have seven innings of baseball to play, and I’m being told there are plenty of tickets available.”

At that moment, the rain stops.

Walt looks up and points through the windshield. The entire city of Cincinnati is spread before us in a breathtaking panorama. I take in this new clearness of the day with my good eye, in absolute awe of the sudden and wonderful metamorphosis. It’s a landscape worthy of documentation.

“Beck,” I whisper.

“On it,” he says, raising his camera, snapping away.

How strange—only minutes ago, Beck was aiming in the same direction, documenting something else altogether. The city, in all its grandeur, had been there the whole time, hidden by the storm.

Walt claps his hands, squeals, bounces in his seat. Before I have a chance to settle him down, Beck turns his camera from the Cincinnati skyline to Walt, and for just a moment, the scene eases into slow motion. Beck’s smile is intense and sincere, a smile with, not a smile at. Mom used to say you could tell a lot by the way a person treats the innocent, and Walt is nothing if not innocence personified. Ricky was, too. I think about Ty Zarnstorff and all his little bully clones, united in their mutual disdain for kids who strayed from the pack. No matter that the stray was harmless, gullible, weak. No matter that Ricky eventually gave up trying to make friends and settled into a pathetic desire to be left alone. No matter that I was a friend to Ricky that one summer, then, God save me, ignored him on the playground, and in class, and in the cafeteria, and in the gym. Son of a bitch, I can’t believe I did that. And my instincts are no better off now. Rather than join in the laughter, the unadulterated joy, as Beck did, my knee-jerk reaction to Walt’s excitement was to calm him down. Minimize his embarrassment. Minimize my own.

I turn to look out the window, smiling my own smile, more timid than I’d like. And I cry. I cry thinking about the Rickys and Walts of the world, smiling in the face of all those Ty Zarnstorffs. I cry because I’ve never smiled like that, not once in my life.

I cry because I love. For some reason, I always have.





25


Our Only Color





September 3—late afternoonish


Dear Isabel,

“Your mother and I are getting divorced.”