The Resurrectionist

11

Sweeney knew next to nothing about the city. And he felt no great need to educate himself. It was another rust-belt mill town and he had no intention of finding a way into its gritty life. He’d make his home at the Clinic. Come into town when necessary, when he needed supplies or maybe to see a movie sometime.

He was about a mile from the Peck when he noticed the warning light on the gas gauge. The drive-away agency had guaranteed that the car would be delivered with a full tank. He drove a few blocks, trying to tamp down the anger, and then it was no good and he was yelling son of a bitch and pounding the dash.

He came to a red light and, thinking he heard the engine start to gasp, he took a sudden arcing swing at the windshield. His fist went numb for an instant as the center of the glass formed a web of thin cracks. He put his fist in his lap and the pain came alive across the knuckles. The light turned green. A car behind him honked. He looked across the intersection and saw an antique, two-pump gas station.

As an attendant filled his tank, he made his way to the men’s room and ran cold water over his hand. It did nothing to alleviate the pain. He turned off the water, held both hands next to each other. One was already swelling but both were shaking. He tried controlled breathing for what seemed a ridiculous amount of time. Then he exited the toilet, paid for his gas, and asked where he could find the nearest shopping center.

The attendant seemed a little confused by the question and gave it all his concentration. He pointed down the road.

“The Mart might still be open,” he said. “It’s closing any day, but it might still be open.”

A half mile east, Sweeney found a nearly deserted plaza, a relic from the pre-mall era. A dozen small stores — a pharmacy, a shoe repair, a barbershop — were anchored by a five-and-ten. The structure had a flat roof and sported a metal awning that ran the length of the sidewalk. All of the stores but the five-and-ten were empty and, from the looks, had been for some time. Some were shuttered, others had whitewashed front windows, but the barbershop was wide open, its door and window smashed in.

Sweeney parked and locked the car and decided he wouldn’t linger. The Mart had automatic doors, but they weren’t working and he had to struggle to open one manually. Inside, the lighting was dim and yellow, an effect he found at first unsettling and, somewhat later, almost charming. Most stores overdosed on the fluorescents.

He grabbed a red canvas handbasket and began to walk the aisles. There was no apparent order to anything. Nothing was grouped by department. He found spray paint next to beach pails. Cakes of soap next to goldfish bowls. It was like a trip back to his childhood and, had his hand not hurt so much, he might have managed to lose himself for a few minutes. There were a half-dozen items that he picked up and examined, not interested in purchasing any of them, but simply stunned that they were still manufactured.

He began to suspect that he was entirely alone in the store until he turned a corner and came upon the key-making booth. The old man inside, perched on a stool, dressed in full apron and a knobby cardigan, was smoking a cigarette. Sweeney tried to recall the last time he’d seen someone smoking inside a department store. The man looked bored and hot and Sweeney thought about handing over the car keys just to give the guy something to do.

Instead, he said, “I’m looking for boys’ pajamas.”

The old man blew out a lungful of smoke and said, “Try aisle seven.”

Sweeney thanked him and moved on. None of the aisles were marked, so he continued to browse. As he looked at eggbeaters and cheese graters, clothesline rope and a full bin of rubber galoshes, he realized there wasn’t much chance that he’d find what he was searching for. But then there they were, on a table that featured a red plastic flag that bore the last traces of the word Special, dozens of pairs of Limbo pajamas. Along with random piles of Limbo card games with their box flaps taped closed, a few issues of the comic books with the covers torn off, Limbo wall calendars from years past, and some tiny, green plastic freak figures that Sweeney had never seen before. About the size of toy soldiers. Some of them, he noticed, were missing their heads.

He picked through the pile, selected four summer-weight pajama sets in Danny’s size. He held them up and out from his chest, sized them the way Kerry used to, and made sure there were no tears. He studied the design, tried to pick out as many characters as he could. Chick and Kitty and Bruno were easy, of course. But he could never remember the name of the lobster girl or the pinhead or the human torso. Though he could have told anyone that the human torso had lost his bottom half in a bear attack.

It was significant how someone became a freak. Danny had assured him of that. Some people, his son had explained, are just born that way. But some become freaks due to an accident.

He threw the pajamas in the basket and hunted down coffee, a percolator, a bottle of aspirin, plastic hangers for his lab coats, and three sets of twin sheets. Then he began tossing items that he didn’t need into the basket. A box of magic markers. A jar of olives. A thermometer. A Big Chief writing tablet. A package of mothballs. As he stood paging through a 1972 atlas of the interstate highway system, he began to smell frying meat. It was still only midmorning but the aroma was wonderful and he tossed the atlas atop the mothballs and followed the scent to the rear of the store.

Where he found a lunch counter that had been preserved, unchanged since, perhaps, the summer of love. A dozen leather-topped stools were mounted before a marble ledge. The black and white menu on the wall above the grill was faded but legible and offered a handful of staples like chicken salad and lime rickeys. Sweeney stared at it, thinking the prices were impossible. That over the years, the menu had evolved into a piece of nostalgic art. Of the same era as the napkin dispensers and the cake plates with their glass domes, but no longer functional.

The old key maker was behind the counter but he’d removed his cardigan. He was bent over a spitting grill, moving a beef patty around with a spatula. A single customer was perched on the last stool at the end of the counter, a tall biker in full leather, including jacket, chaps, and boots.

The guy had his elbows resting on the counter and his hands folded in front of him, as if in prayer. And though he wore sunglasses, Sweeney had the sense that his eyes were closed. At least until the biker turned his head and said, “What are you looking at?”

The question contained just the right degree of threat. The key maker turned from the grill and gave Sweeney a look as if to say Stop bothering the customer.

“Nothing,” Sweeney said. “I just didn’t know they served food here.”

The biker cocked his head until the old man slid a platter in front of him. The plate was bone white and heavy-looking and big enough to contain a rump roast but it held only a plump burger garnished with lettuce and tomato, a dill pickle, and a small pile of potato chips. Sweeney looked from the biker down to the platter and felt himself start to salivate.

“You going to order,” asked the old man, “or can I shut down the grill?”

“Aren’t you just opening?” Sweeney said, and the old man cleared his throat and let it suffice for an answer.

Sweeney put his basket down, slid onto the stool, and said, “I’ll have what he’s having,” gesturing toward the other end of the counter.

The old man tilted his head and bulged his eyes a little, as if to confirm the order, but the biker paid no attention. He was taking fast, aggressive bites out of his burger, making snapping, doglike motions with his jaw, and wiping the resulting spray of grease off his chin with the back of his hand. By the time Sweeney’s meal was ready, the biker had cleared his platter. He pulled a stack of napkins from the dispenser, wiped at his lips and then his fingers and deposited the saturated paper in the middle of his plate.

“Food of the gods, Myer,” he said to the old man as he climbed off the stool. “I’ll see you next Saturday.”

The old man poured water onto the grill from a glass coffeepot and watched the liquid sizzle and spatter. He shook his head without turning around and began to scrape debris into a grease well. As the biker passed behind Sweeney on his way to the exit, Sweeney swiveled and said, “Excuse me.”

The biker stopped walking and froze, overly dramatic. The old man, Myer, turned and put a hand to his forehead. Sweeney had taken a bite of pickle and began to talk with his mouth full.

“I wonder if you can help me,” he said. “I’m new in town and I was wondering, you know, if you knew a good garage. I’m having some problems with my car.”

The biker looked at Myer, then at Sweeney. He took a step forward and removed the sunglasses. He let his head sink down into his shoulders a little, then said, “I look like a fucking mechanic to you?”

Sweeney looked at Myer, hoping he’d step in or turn the moment into a joke. The old man looked infuriated.

“No,” Sweeney said. “I’m sorry, I just—”

“You just what?” the voice getting even lower. “You just looking for a reason to talk to me?”

“No, I thought—”

“You some kind of faggot?” the biker said and looked at Myer. “You serving faggots in here now, Myer?”

The old man looked down to the floor and said, “Not that I know of, Mr. Cote.”

“Look,” said Sweeney, “I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”

“You’re goddamn right you’re sorry. You trying to pick me up, you little cocksucker?”

“Jesus Christ,” Sweeney said and put his hands up. “No. No. You’ve got the wrong idea. I’m new. I’m new here.”

The biker put a finger on Sweeney’s chest and pressed in on the breastbone. “I’ll bury your fucking ass, you want.”

“For Christ sake,” Sweeney said. “I didn’t mean anything. I was looking for a garage.”

The biker bit down on his bottom lip, seemed to think for a second. Then he removed his finger, reached past Sweeney, and took the uneaten burger off the platter.

“You’re new to a town,” he said and pointed with the bulky roll and Sweeney watched some grease drop onto the boots, “you watch your manners. You understand that?”

Sweeney shook his head. The biker bit into the meat, chewed and swallowed, then said, “Buzz Cote is no fucking mechanic, asshole.” Then he put the burger back on the platter and left the lunch counter. Sweeney could hear his boots click on the tile floor all the way to the front of the store.

Myer took the platter and threw it in a rubber bus tub and said, “What the hell is the matter with you, mister?”

Sweeney looked up at him. “You heard me. I just asked the guy a simple question.”

Myer threw a hand out, disgusted.

“Listen,” Sweeney said, the weight of the encounter starting to settle on him, “I’m brand new in town. I’ve got some problems with my Honda. That’s it. I swear to you.”

“And why didn’t you ask me?” Myer said, steadying himself with a hand on the counter. “I’ve lived here seventy years. Most of my life. I’ve been through more lousy cars than you can count. Why the hell didn’t you ask me for a garage?”

“I just thought, you know, the guy must know bikes—”

“You just thought,” wiping hands on a dishrag, disgust moving up a notch to contempt. “Did you find the pajamas?”

The shift in subject, if not tone, was so sudden that Sweeney was confused.

“The pajamas,” Myer said, on the verge of yelling, “the pajamas. Me, you’ll ask about boys’ pajamas. You know I once lived next to a garage?”

“I didn’t mean to cause any problems,” Sweeney said. He got off the stool, bent down and lifted his basket, and took a step toward the checkout.

“Give me that,” Myer said, extending his arms across the counter for the basket.

Sweeney handed it over, but said, “Don’t you want to ring it up down front?”

“Something wrong with this register?” Myer said, indicating an antique brass machine located down by the soda taps. But he didn’t go near the ringer. Instead, he rummaged in the basket, shifting items and muttering. “Gimme thirty bucks.”

Sweeney was getting more confused by the second. “What are you talking about?” he said. “The percolator alone is twenty dollars. I’ve got three sets of sheets in there.”

“You,” Myer said, shaking his head, resigned to his annoyance, “are a disagreeable SOB.”

“But you’re cheating yourself.”

Myer handed the basket back to him and said, “Gimme thirty bucks or get out of my store.”

Sweeney went into his pocket, came out with a hundred. “I’ve only got big bills,” he said. “Can you make change?”

Myer pushed air out between his teeth, his aggravation beyond words now. He snatched the bill, shuffled to the register, hammered the sale tab with the palm of his hand, planted the bill, grabbed change, and slammed the cash drawer with his hip. He moved back to Sweeney with a heavy head and handed him a fifty.

“This isn’t correct,” Sweeney said.

“Get the hell out,” Myer said.

SWEENEY DROVE DIRECTLY back to the hospital. This morning, on his way down the hill, he’d thought about finding a comic book store and searching for some of the back issues of Limbo they were missing. Maybe he’d pick up some dumbbells at a sporting goods store and some rabbit ears, if they still made them, at a Radio Shack. But now he just wanted to get safely back to the Peck. He’d eat some lunch at the cafeteria and spend the afternoon with Danny.

He got lost twice because he couldn’t stop replaying the incident at the lunch counter. His question about the garage was honest and innocent enough. Why had it provoked such an overreaction? Granted, it would have been smarter to ask the old man. And maybe most people would’ve avoided the biker out of a general sense of caution. But what bothered Sweeney more than his bad judgment was that this kind of thing had been happening for a year now.

Back in Cleveland, he’d find himself almost weekly in an instantaneous shouting match, often with customers and always, it seemed to him, with the most ridiculous instigation. In the last six months, he’d had arguments in parking lots, pizza houses, dry cleaners, and the public library. And more than a few of them had rushed right up to the brink of physical violence.

Because of the number of incidents, logic told Sweeney that, at least some of the time, he must have been the inciting party. But when he’d replay the scene after the fact, he’d find himself, invariably, the clueless victim. Slow on the uptake. Stumbling through an ineffectual defense.

He’d shared a few of the early incidents with the therapist in Shaker Heights. And it was the only time her manner had turned from professionally compassionate to suspicious. She’d interrogated him, asked insulting and provocative questions: Are you sure that’s what you said to the man? Are you sure that’s how you said it?

After each of those sessions, she had tried to sell him on a prescription. And he’d asked her, joking, kidding around to defuse the tension, if she’d taken a job with Pfizer.

Sweeney considered himself, if not a pacifist, then at least a man less comfortable with casual violence than the rest of his culture seemed to be. He found nothing appealing in the cheap brutality of boxing or hockey. The nightly spewing of blood and viscera on television appalled him — maybe even more than it did Kerry. In the pharmacy, he had occasion to see stressed and overtired parents give in to the urge and deliver the fast slap or pinch to fussy children. He called them on it every time and once had notified Social Services.

He’d been a quiet kid growing up, bordering, maybe, on withdrawn. Through high school, he’d had exactly one fistfight and it had been less than glorious, a short and awkward tussle with a next-door neighbor. In college, he’d gravitated to pot more than booze, spent long, slow hours in small, dim rooms with a handful of friends, passing pipes and eating pizza and listening to mournful songs.

His amiability had occasionally grated on Kerry. At dinner once, a few years ago, when he’d boasted to friends that he and his wife never argued, she put a hand on his shoulder and said, “I try, but he just won’t fight.”

But over the past twelve months, he’d been in more arguments than in the rest of his lifetime.

And then there were the outbursts of rage, so far directed only at inanimate objects. At the old house, he’d had to replace two closet doors and the mirror on the medicine cabinet before he could hire a Realtor to sell the place. At the pharmacy one night after closing, he’d knocked a shelf clean and thrown a can of Ensure across the room, gouging the wall. It was infantile stuff. Pure temper tantrum. And after the fact, it always scared him and sickened him.

What if his response to the biker’s abuse had been to grab for his knife or fork? He’d have ended up in the hospital or, less likely, in lockup on assault charges. Either way, he’d be jeopardizing both his and Danny’s stay at the Clinic.

Maybe he’d call Shaker Heights tonight and ask for a referral and a prescription. But probably he wouldn’t.