They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee

Cancer Face

For the first time since I’d gotten to Guppy’s underground palace of Red paranoia, we ate breakfast together. I whipped up some omelets and bacon and toast, keeping Guppy as far away from the kitchen as possible. We dined in the bunker. The fact was, we had spent little if any time as a group. We all seemed far too preoccupied with our own guilts and ghosts to bother with socializing. And when we did attempt to make small talk, the small talk tended to degenerate into anger, the anger into silence, the silence into separation.

The only noise at breakfast was the scraping of silverware on cheap china. No one mentioned my phone calls or my plans of surrender, though I felt sure that Zak and Guppy had some sense of what was going on. The weather had broken finally and Guppy could no longer avoid work. With the better weather came the paper. As we ate, it sat folded and untouched like a boobytrapped centerpiece at your cousin Mary’s wedding. Everybody wanted to take it home, but were afraid of what might happen if they made the first grab. I thought I caught Zak’s arm twitch as if he had decided to go for it only to change his mind at the last moment.

“For chrissakes!” MacClough growled, unfolding the paper to show us the front page. “Take a gander.”

I looked like hell in black and white. Sometimes I think newspapers purposefully hunt down your ugliest photo before going to press. The Riversborough Gazette had nearly succeeded. It wasn’t my investigator’s license photo-Sorry, MacClough. It wasn’t my bar mitzvah portrait-I’d burned all the copies. What it was was a head shot of me at Sissy Randazzo’s prom. I sported an afro the size of a small asteroid, no beard, and a mustache that could have been a caterpillar, but never a moth. The grainy reproduction made it impossible to differentiate between my acne and freckles. The lapels on my polyester tux were piped in dark felt and wider than the thirteenth and fourteenth fairways at Augusta. The ruffles on my shirt added three inches to my chest and my bow tie looked like two yield signs welded together. The fact that one of my eyes was half closed when the picture was taken did nothing to enhance my already splendid visage and attire. It did, however, make me look like an escapee from an Ed Wood movie.

And all along I was thinking that Sissy Randazzo had forgiven me for grabbing her nipples that night and pretending to tune in Radio Free Europe. You never can tell. On the other hand, as Guppy was quick to point out, no one would ever recognize me now from that picture. We all actually had a pretty good laugh at my old self. MacClough stopped laughing first. We were quiet again.

“What?”

“They think you’re here,” Johnny said.

“Here!” Guppy was disbelieving.

Zak jumped up. “Let’s get-”

“Not in this house,” MacClough shoved Zak back down in his seat. “In Riversborough.”

“So what?” I was curious. “We know that from TV.”

“From what it says here, the cops are thinking of starting a house to house for you now that the weather’s calmed down.”

“I’m safe down here,” I said.

MacClough sneered: “Yeah, Hitler had the same idea.”

“Maybe I should not go to work.”

“No!” Johnny and I chimed. “You go. We can’t afford to raise any suspicions,” he finished.

Then something hit me. I don’t know, it was like stepping into a hole that was camouflaged by fallen leaves. You’re not expecting to fall and all of a sudden boom, you’re down.

“Why?” I asked.

“Why what, Uncle Dylan?

“Why here?”

“Why here what?” Guppy joined in.

“Don’t mind him,” MacClough teased, “the pressure’s gettin’ to him.”

“No. Listen, we’ve been going round and around, asking ourselves a thousand questions, but not getting the answers we need. Why do you think that is? It’s because we haven’t been asking the right question.”

“So,” Zak wondered, “what’s the right question?”

“Why here?” I repeated.

“Jesus, that shit again.”

“Why Riversborough?” I screamed at MacClough. “Why here? What makes Riversborough the Isotope capital of the northeast? What’s here? Come on guys, what’s here?

“The school,” Zak said.

“The ski resorts,” Guppy added.

“Canada,” MacClough chimed in unenthusiastically.

“Exactly.,” I counted off on my fingers.‘ “The school, ski resorts, and Canada’s just a few miles north of here.”

John was unimpressed. “So what? There must be twenty places in northern New York within pissing distance of Canada that have schools and resorts of one kind or another. Look at Plattsburgh.”

“But Valencia Jones didn’t go to the state university at Plattsburgh. She wasn’t arrested for drug smuggling leaving a ski resort near Plattsburgh. No one in Plattsburgh felt threatened enough by our presence to have people murdered, MacClough. No one felt they had to burn down a ski resort in-”

“Okay,” he relented, “you’ve made your point, but how does this get us any closer to anything?”

“Guppy, you think you can find out who owns Cyclone Ridge and the Old Watermill?”

“When I arrive home from work, I will set out to accomplish what you ask. I believe I should be able to get into some systems which will-”

“Yes or no?” I cut him off.

“Probably.”

“I’ll settle for probably.”

Guppy thought about expanding on his answer, but one look at MacClough and me convinced him to skip it. He excused himself and went off to work. Johnny admonished him to keep his eyes and ears open and to try and get hold of the New York City papers. When Guppy had gone, we finished our breakfasts and passed the paper around.

“I know who owns the Old Watermill,” Zak said almost sheepishly.

“You do?” I asked. “Who?”

“The school.”

“The school!” MacClough puzzled. “Your school?”

“My school.”

MacClough was skeptical. “I never heard of such a thing. You sure?”

I answered for Zak and explained how it made perfect sense for a college to own a hotel, particularly in a small town. Schools often have to put visiting faculty up for a few days or for a few months. On parents’ weekends, you could guarantee a large number of rooms. I confessed that I had never thought Riversborough the kind of school that needed its own hotel. Usually, it was the sports powerhouse schools that invested in hotels.

“So,” MacClough’s voice smiled, “if colleges can own hotels, they can own ski resorts, right?”

“Holy shit!” Zak and I exclaimed in unison.

“My thoughts exactly,” Johnny winked. “Holy fuckin’ shit indeed.” Now I almost wished the Guppster had hung around.

I hadn’t noticed myself in the mirror since. . in days, anyway. Maybe it was that glorious reproduction of Sissy Randazzo’s prom picture that moved me to do it, to take a look. Maybe it was about time to face the truth about things, about my future or lack thereof. I’d like to think it was simply because my beard was getting scruffy and itchy and I needed a shave.

A lost face stared back at me, lonesome, childish almost. But for the beard it was my face at four. I was four when we first found out about my dad. Well, we found out he was sick. With what, we weren’t told. But its name was whispered in dark corners when my parents thought they were alone. It’s funny how parents try to protect themselves by protecting you. That was the face, the cancer face, the word whispered in the dark. I was lost then, too.

Most of the superficial scratches had already faded so that they were just traces now. I guess you can’t force a dead hand to scratch with the same enthusiasm as a live one might in anger. The deeper cuts had begun to scab over. Very attractive and not too obvious to a blind man. I shaved my beard off. And I was fully four years old again; wide, sad eyes and chubby-cheeked. But back then, I didn’t know my eyes were blue. I swear to God, I assumed they were brown. What do four-year-olds know from blue eyes? To me, the world had brown eyes like my father. It was good to have the beard off. I was tired of hiding from myself, even more so than from the authorities.

Staring into the mirror, my face morphed into Kira’s. The details of her face were sketchy to me. I hadn’t had the time to know it, its range of expressions, its lines and creases. What I had of it, all I would ever have of it, would have to be enough. And I vowed to the faces in the mirror, all the faces-my beardless face, cancer face, and Kira’s-that I would find some reason in her death even if finding it meant sacrificing myself in the process. You know the kind of promise. You’ve read the words in a hundred cheesy novels. You’ve heard them spoken in twenty cheesy movies. But the words I spoke were not empty words. Some promises are meant to be kept.