A Calling for Charlie Barnes, Page 3

  “So what do you think?”

  “About?”

  “My new idea,” he said, having discovered that he had returned to the kitchen landline and dialed his kid brother’s number without really being aware of it, or knowing why. “My Chippin’ In.”

  “Charlie,” Rudy said. “It’s only been half an hour since you sent me that doc.”

  Rudy made a pretty good nut selling water pills and horse powders to the internet’s deluded desperate. In the past, when Charlie complained of some bane or ailment, Rudy would gift him with whatever vitamin supplements available on his website that he believed would cure the complaint, as well as extend Charlie’s life expectancy—as if that were the goal. He could well remember once opening a box from Tucson and finding, among the ten or so bottles of obscure enzymes and hard-to-pronounce amino acids, one clearly marked FOR CANINE USE ONLY.

  “Turns out, Rudy, I’m in a real hurry.”

  “Why the rush, Charlie?”

  Should he come clean? He didn’t think so. He didn’t want pity points just because he was dying.

  “Eager to get it off the ground, that’s all.”

  “Chippin’ In,” Rudy said.

  “That’s right. Chippin’ In.”

  In the silence that followed, the gloom pressed in on him from every direction, and with the landline at his ear he drifted out of the kitchen but could go only so far on account of the cord. The one thing he found enlivening the dull suburban sitting room into which he stepped was, in his opinion, the crossword puzzle on the coffee table, companionably filled out in his and Barbara’s hand the weekend before and left unfinished, the stubby pencil abandoned in the paper’s hollow. They had been stymied by 48 Across: “Experts at exports.” After clawing T-R-U-T-H into the light of day, they could take the clue no further, and their efforts fizzled; nevertheless, that puzzle represented two contented hours with his hardworking wife, who, that Sunday morning, had made her famous coffee cake. On the table next to the puzzle, between two cheap bookends, sat a small collection of novels, one written by his son, which Charlie had endeavored to finish more than once to no avail.

  “Sorry, Charlie, you gotta give me a little more time here,” Rudy replied. “I’m still working on my morning joe.”

  “Tell ya what,” he said. “You call me when you’re ready. I won’t bother you again.”

  10

  In the east-facing kitchen, where the sunlight at that hour fell in a single polygon of heat through the sliding-glass doors, he put things in order. He sealed off the natural light by closing the venetian blinds. Then he turned on the overhead light, encased in its stained-glass dome, to create a more mellow artificial morning. He collected the bowl followed by the spoon before crunching something underfoot—a bit of egg noodle, which cracked and scattered—as he retrieved the skim milk from the fridge. He made room for himself at the crowded kitchen table, where he sat eating his breakfast while nibbling away at columns of newsprint—the sports page to begin, followed (on Fridays) by the movie reviews.

  It was impossible, however, for Steady Boy to resist the conclusion that he was a big fat failure in life. He tried to stay focused on slicing and dicing, with his expert spoon, those deliriously addictive crunchy Os in their sweet cold milk, but he was slowly consumed by terror. His efforts had never been enough. When they were enough, they were wrongly directed. On those rare occasions when his every effort was perfectly on the mark, his timing sucked. When his timing was right, he lacked the funds. When the funds came through, he botched the execution. When the execution was seamless, the market failed to materialize. But no, there was always a market, it just wanted something different, something better, something unsoiled by his clumsy hands. All he touched turned to shit. He was born a nobody and that’s how he would die.

  He abandoned his breakfast and walked out of the house.

  He was coming, he was going, he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing. He was just out there, under the sun. He’d enjoyed it a minute ago, felt intoxicated by a sneeze. Now nowhere did the world seem drearier. Rust Road was a nasty little strip of crumbling blacktop, a diseased tongue, the bowels of the earth saying ahhh. All down the block, blacktop, and garbage toters, and rusting minivans, and telephone lines and the shadows of telephone lines. Each house, one selfsame suburban ranch after another, was invariably set too close to its neighbor. Planes dropping into O’Hare flew directly overhead, a thousand daily Boeings skimming the rooftops. One was descending even now. He could taste its exhaust. This was no one’s idea of a final resting place. But he would die here. He would die in that house.

  A neighbor loading up his minivan across the street turned at the peripheral agitation of an old man describing small circles in his driveway while muttering to himself. Charlie hadn’t seen him at first. Now he felt like a jerk. He stopped circling on a dime and waved. Pretense and fakery. Nothing to see here, friend. No one losing his fucking mind in a mortal panic, ha ha. Now, knowing Steady Boy as well as I do, I know he will want to save face, but what action will he take to—

  Ordinarily, in a work of fiction, one is free to move a character around at will, to swap the cat in the window for a dog at his feet, outfit him with a cardigan or (considering the heat) blink away the cardigan while dampening the pits of his button-down, force the feds to pull up and place him under arrest for securities fraud or (knowing his heart, his scrupulous heart) tweak the SWAT team into something more fantastical, like that trio of meticulously dressed sponsors of a million-dollar sweepstakes—the cameraman, the notary, and the nice lady in pearls—appearing out of the blue with an oversize check: Charlie rescued, Charlie redeemed. It is even ordinarily within my power to have hover with no advance warning, and capable of being observed by Charlie alone, a lenticular UFO over the skies of Schaumburg, beaming him up from Rust Road so that he might bow out of this mortal little game without playing by its rules, which was his private wish. But I promised the old man to tell it straight this time, to stick to the facts for once, to abide by the historical record, and to exercise the discipline imposed by real life (the “harsh truth,” in Stendhal’s phrase), which has always been so loathsome to us both.

  Pivoting, he walked to the mailbox. He opened it. He peered inside. Finding the nothing he knew would be waiting, he closed it up again. In that way, he feigned for the neighbor a greater purpose for being outside than resisting an ugly fate at his kitchen table. Then he tramped back up the drive and into the house. True story.

  11

  His career as a working stiff began, for all intents and purposes, on a night in October of 1956, when a young lady named Sue Starter walked by him at a high school football game as he was picking his nose in the middle of a dreamy youth. Against all odds, she found him fetching enough in his buzz cut and bib overalls to make a demand. “Buy me a Coke,” she said.

  His reply was a dumb and startled look. “Who, me?”

  “Whatsa matter?” she asked him. “Don’t you got any money?”

  Hell, no, he didn’t have any money. He had a curfew and a birthday: the sum total of his worldly possessions in 1956, and an indication of his sweeping power. At the sound of Sue’s voice, he woke from his boyhood as if stepping through an interdimensional shimmer dividing Before from After, dreamer from damned, and vowed there and then to get a job.

  Before long, there were more demands just like it: buy me a milk shake, Charlie, buy me a cheeseburger, buy me those shoes in the window. Let’s go to the dance, Charlie. Let’s go to the movies. Let’s go to the state fair.

  Let’s have a closer look at Sue. Appearance-wise, Jerry’s mother was a dark dream with full lips and almond eyes; fashion-wise, she spared no expense but looked as conservative as all the rest; in terms of morals she was entirely conventional; in personality a flirt; in outlook a skeptic; in disposition a bleak and dire depressive; in political mind-set more progressive than most; in matters of sex, boldly forward, then discreetly withholding; she was mercurial at parties a
nd dances (a charmer one night, a mute the next); in love a total slave, but as an object of a man’s desire, she was a merciless and cunning manipulator. If her kindness was subject to moods, she had her table manners down cold, and her telephone etiquette was impeccable. Charlie knew as much because within a week of their first encounter, he had called her residence to let her know that he was bundling and delivering the Danville Commercial-News for four bits a week plus tips. Would she like to go out on a date with him?

  He would not last long as a paperboy—four months, by his current reckoning. At the time, it felt like an ice age: waking in the predawn in the heart of winter, sick to his stomach from lack of sleep, pedaling through the freezing dark and wanting to die long before bundling the first of those morning editions … he started looking for a new job almost immediately. By the time he graduated from high school, he’d worked at a poultry farm, a lumberyard, the Lauhoff grain mill on North Avenue, and the refractory plant in Tilton, a two-mile walk.

  Never a calling, these jobs. Thrilling at first, with the promise of more pay and future potential, they soon grew dull and proved short-lived, premised as they were on a simple exchange: my time for your money. Not even good money, really: one cent a bushel, two bits an hour, three dollars a day. But what amounted to pocket change and gave him a taste of power ended up blinding Charlie for too long, false gold foreclosing on too much: a college education, a law school degree, partnership at a law firm (pictured as a crystal decanter on a mahogany bar cart), or perhaps some steady climb up the corporate ladder, a place in the academy or in the halls of power. More damnably still, pocket change prevented him from seeking any ticket out of that dead-end town, as he was convinced he wanted what tethered him to Danville: a wife and child at age nineteen. Happily he took jobs, quit jobs, got fired, walked into storage closets and meat lockers forgetting what he came for, his mind always on some more palpable dream.

  Courtship, adults called it; it was “necking” to teenagers; among sophisticates, “lovemaking”: to young Charlie, it was a barnyard urge, and it would determine entirely the first decade of his adult life. When he looked back on those lost years, he could only shake his head. Other boys managed to overcome it, moving with alacrity out of the barnyard into lecture halls, conference rooms, military bases, you name it, where instead of indulging it, you could tease out its marketing power or write treatises on its role in history, making real money in the process. Charlie kilned brick instead, hauled lumber, flipped burgers, made ballast, sluiced cow guts off tile walls, attached castings to chassis at the GM plant, coated fiberglass for Tee-Pac, sorted jellied candies on a conveyor belt, and drove a truck for Fred Amend out of Hoopeston before finally putting on a suit and tie to sell shoes for Mr. Jonart, all in the name of keeping his young wife as happy as fate would allow so that he might continue to get laid.

  She was never all that happy. He was holding Jerry in his arms before work one morning, pointing out squirrels through the kitchen window, when she told him she hated her life. Hated him, and the baby, too. Jerry wasn’t yet a year old. Then she confessed through tears that she was in love with someone else. Blew his fucking mind. Pretense and fakery. Was anything real? “I love Marshall,” she kept saying. “I don’t love you, I love Marshall.” Who the fuck was Marshall? Marshall Giacone, who ran the ball for Westville the year they took state. Charlie didn’t stand a chance. He was devastated, angry, confused. If “Buy me a Coke” had barged in to a boyhood dream, permanently waking him to some greater reality, “I’m in love with Marshall” inaugurated him into the living nightmare that adult life could be. Deception, shattered dreams, the heavy burdens of parenthood … and Charlie Barnes, at twenty, still secretly a boy himself.

  “I’m in love with Marshall” should have spelled the end of his union with Sue Starter, but it dragged on another ten years—ten more years!

  12

  Ten minutes later, he dumped the bowl of cereal that had gone soggy during his time outside, poured a fresh bowl, his third, and took up the newspaper again, somehow managing, this time, to remain seated. He soon found himself absorbed in another round of reporting on subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, and the collapse of the global economy … when the power went out. He looked up. The overhead light was dead, and the radio had ceased midsong.

  He glanced at the microwave to his right, down the sunnier side of which a thirsty philodendron unfurled. The blank display confirmed it: the room was suspended, irrevocably it seemed, in a monochromatic lifelessness he didn’t care for one bit. It felt like someone had come along and tossed a dustcloth over the entire room, including the human being at the center of it, as if to say now just imagine it like this for all eternity and you have your fate. He was begging the light to reignite, the music to burst forth again, the status quo to go on, and on, and on … when the phone, the wall-mounted landline he used to call Rudy, began to ring. It was that line his doctor would be calling to offer his update.

  He didn’t immediately answer.

  Later, he would play back this hesitation—really, this revelation—and break it down into its component parts, slice the experience finer and finer while praying to God that it never recurred, but in real time, there was only the raw, unfortunate thought, which arrived in a flash: I would rather go insane. For the insane know something that Charlie intuited at the phone’s first mighty roar. And what exactly was it that Charlie knew? I’ve asked myself that question many times, and though I’ve never taken prescription medication for a mental illness or spent time in a locked ward, if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say it comes down to this: engagement is optional. No one asks to be born, but once here, we elect to remain—or not. Suicide might seem to most like the epitome of crazy, but to a different subset it is sanity disguised. The freedom to disengage from everyday life never occurs to the well adjusted as they go about busily pursuing their fortunes, starting their families and completing their adventures in living color, but it is murmuring from the basement, whispering from the cell, screaming from the walls of the asylum all the while. Until the power blinked off and the phone began to ring, Charlie was in it, one among oblivious millions. He answered the door. He rotated his tires. He obeyed garbage night. But when the ringing phone required his further participation in life, for the first time he hung back, wondering: Why give it?

  It reminds me (as it did him at the time) of something similar in the historical record, only of less consequence. The year was 1953. Charlie Boy to his mother, Chi-Chi to his little brother, Steady Boy was thirteen the year he fell in love with the game of basketball. The whole memory descended as the phone rang a second time, as if its horrible scream were also a most delicate summons. Intact again, sturdy, even, were his two rickety knees, his earliest hopes and dreams. The ball, a gift wrapped in soft leather, contained more marvels and mysteries than a spinning globe. One fun trick was to bounce it hard on the blacktop at just the right angle so as to send it through the hoop on its downward journey. It hardly mattered that he failed once to move out of the way in time and the ball came for him, pile-driving his nose into his brains and making his ears ring; even the game’s treacheries were beguiling. That summer, he would stir at the break of dawn, and with one whole foot still in some dream recall the basketball. His eyes would ping open and he would reach out and begin dribbling at his bedside in the half dark regardless of who might still be sleeping. His mother, a constant confiscator of that ball, would sit up from a dead sleep and move her head birdlike, while the unhappy lump lying next to her—Charlie saw all this perfectly in his mind’s eye fifty-five years later—prepared to answer the debt collector’s rhythmic knock in a swiftly souring dream of his own. Into that bright dawn and new day, and into the long, luxurious afternoon that leafed its green hours in great abundance, Charlie dribbled, man. Frank Santacroce, the grocer’s son, whose mother purchased for him a pristine white pair of Chuck Taylor All-Stars with “Sure Foot” suction soles and whose father built him a hoop behind th
e family store, might have shot the ball better, might have scored more points, but Charlie was the ball handler. A whisper, a whoosh, a rumor of a ghost, Charlie faked—and went by Frank every time. It was with the confidence earned from his one-on-one games against Frank that he entered the court during junior varsity tryouts his freshman year of high school believing no other dribbler at Danville High could beat him. The coach, one Stan Butkus, a World War II vet with a fused spine that prevented him from bending over, so that at least once every practice he would stiffly kick some errant ball to kingdom come as if out of sheer instinct, regarded Charlie that day as though he liked what he saw.

  “Very good, son,” he said with all the loose baller jive of an iron rod. “Now show me what you can do with your other hand.”

  “My other hand, sir?”

  “Your left hand, son. Pass the ball between both hands.”

  Both hands … it had never occurred to Charlie to regard that as an option. Why give over to the left hand what the right did with such grace? “I could try it, sir, I guess,” he said, and promptly had the ball stolen from him by some showboat who had no right to leap out like that. The whole clutch followed after, leaving him alone to notice, at midcourt, all the two-handed dribbling going on. Was that really how dribbling was done?

  As it turned out, there were rules, customs, advanced techniques, all very difficult to master. He did try. He fell in line, ran drills. Did all he could to overcome the awkwardness of two-handed dribbling until, exhibiting no great improvement, benched most games, and turning bitter toward the ball, he dropped out, gave it up, joined the dramatics club instead. It proved a better fit. And now, as the phone shrieked a third, extra-long time, demanding he talk to the doctor, whose requirements for further life were bound to be more exacting than Coach Butkus’s sporting demands from half a century prior, he wanted to drop out with that same sigh of insufficiency and mournful wising up that tainted the end of his brief devotion to basketball. But drop out of life? There would be no dramatics club waiting in the wings, while suicide would only hasten what he hoped to forestall. Bowing out could only mean a break with reality, opening a trapdoor in the stage somewhere and laughing, laughing while falling down a chute, into a fiction.