Dance Real Slow Read online

  “A present?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you play?” asked Michael.

  “Nope,” Harper said, balancing the broken glass, piled in sparkling heaps, over to a trash barrel. “In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever even been on a horse. Except maybe when I was little, at one of those riding zoos or someplace.”

  At that point, I did not think I would ever have much to do with Harper Blyth. Not for any particular reason, other than I didn’t think he was the kind of person with whom an aspiring attorney should associate.

  When I wake up, Calvin is standing at the foot of my bed, wet again. The rain is steady, like an engine, and Calvin has gone outside in only his pajama bottoms and a large sombrero that my mother brought back from Mexico.

  “You’re not normal,” I tell him, into my pillow.

  “Are you gettin’ up?”

  He moves around to the side of the bed, near where my face is mashed against the stiff ridge of the mattress.

  “Why did you go outside?” I ask him softly.

  “To get Moonie,” he says, lowering his head to see if my eyes are open. Moonie is our neighbor Mrs. Grafton’s cat. I lie still, breathing easy for several minutes. Finally, I roll from my side onto my back, staring straight up at the stucco ceiling.

  “Calvin, where is Moonie?”

  Calvin reaches over, grabbing the blanket above my chest and hoisting himself on the bed. He lifts up his leg, straddling my stomach, his knees pressed firmly against my rib cage.

  “Oh, she’s okay.”

  “Where’s okay?”

  “She’s drying off,” Calvin says, shoving his wet face onto my shoulder, the sombrero slipping down the side of his back. “In the basement. With the clothes.”

  “Good,” I say. “With the clothes.”

  I remain motionless for a few moments longer and then, as if on command, sit up, erect, knocking Calvin backwards onto my shins. I hurl from bed and run down both flights of stairs, until I reach our laundry room. The dryer is off, but I open the door anyway, peering inside. Calvin is behind me.

  “Sheesh, Dad,” he says, his hands cupped together above his groin.

  My chest slows as I stand. Looking across the room, I can see the clothesline is moving, rocking uneasily with the awkward rhythms of an EKG. There is a gray laundry bag hanging from the line, six clothespins fastening it along the top. Moonie is struggling to escape, her tiny claws tearing at the nylon. A stool sits off to the side with a puddle, smooth as linoleum, centered at its base. I undo the bag, and as I pull apart the drawstrings, Moonie scurries across the hard cement floor, trying to find a place to hide. A place to hide from my son.

  “See, Calvin,” I say, taking him by the elbow and leading him toward Moonie. “Now she’s scared of you.”

  “She ain’t a-scared. She just wants to play or something.”

  The two of us walk out of the laundry area, into an adjoining room that is dark and mostly empty except for six or seven large boxes stacked in a far corner. Calvin runs ahead, and when he reaches the boxes, he falls to his knees and starts crawling on all fours. He is making a squeaking sound, calling out for Moonie. The cat wants nothing to do with Calvin and she digs into one of the rear boxes and begins scaling it until she slips over the edge and inside. I reach down, placing my hand below the cat’s front legs, pulling her free. Her claws are caught on a sweater and she brings it halfway out before it drops loose. Calvin comes over to me, taking the cat into his arms, against his chest.

  “See, she’s not scared.”

  The cat looks terrified and she struggles to climb away from Calvin—across his shoulder and down his back. But Calvin is quick and he adjusts Moonie along his sternum.

  “Does Mrs. Grafton know you have Moonie?” I ask, picking up the sweater.

  “I s’pose,” Calvin says.

  “Suppose nothing. You take her back over there.”

  I lift the wool sweater to my face, inhaling deeply when it reaches my nose. Beneath the pungent ammonia stench of mothballs, it smells faintly of Kate.

  “Here,” I say to Calvin. “Slip this on.”

  “That’s not mine.”

  “I know,” I answer, holding Moonie in one hand while I pull the sweater down over Calvin’s head. I roll the sleeves up several times. “It’s your mother’s.”

  He is unimpressed. He takes back the cat and walks toward the staircase, the hem of the sweater flapping a few inches above his feet.

  “And before you go over there, put on your boots.” He lets out a small huff and then climbs away.

  This morning her hair is pulled back tight, into a small blond plume at the back of her head, fastened with a floppy, oversized ribbon. She is wearing a white blouse beneath a pair of coarse, new overalls. Calvin waves to her from the passenger seat of the car.

  “Listen, I’m coming by early today—remind Charlotte,” I say to him, combing the hair out of his face with my fingertips. “I told her last night, just remind her.”

  Meg is still standing in the doorway, adjusting one of the overall straps against her shoulder. She is Calvin’s closest friend. Her mother, Charlotte, watches the two of them most days, while I am at work. Kneeling up, Calvin kisses my cheek and then slams the door behind him. Both Meg and I watch as he navigates the soggy pathway to the house. Part of me imagines that Meg wants to see Calvin slip, landing face-first in a kidney-shaped puddle of creamy mud. She has a dark side not normally so well defined in a child her age. Once, I saw her squish a ladybug beneath her thumb and then smear it down her nose, like war paint. Another time, she took a barbed pine branch and wrapped it around her neck, a fallen crown, yanking until it turned her throat red with irritation. Charlotte hopes she will outgrow this behavior and, truthfully, so do I.

  When Calvin reaches the porch, he turns and gives me a forward nod, as he does most mornings, as if to say, “Go on, already.”

  The car’s stick shift sometimes has trouble with reverse, like today. You have to move it into neutral and shake it with quick, short snaps of your wrists, as if making popcorn in a pot. The car is a cream-colored 1966 Volvo station wagon that belonged to my maternal grandfather, Sanford Blaine. He gave it to me for my seventeenth birthday, four months before he moved from Akron to Phoenix. My father did not want me to have it; he didn’t think I needed a car and he certainly didn’t think I was responsible enough to own one. So, the day after my grandfather brought it over, my father took a baseball bat and caved in both the front and rear windshields. He told me when I could afford to have them replaced I could drive the car. He also told me to sweep up the glass. It took me nine weeks, working two jobs—one before school and one after—before I got new windshields. Three days after I was driving again, the carburetor went. That took me another five weeks to replace.

  I pull onto Kenimore, which is a long two-lane stretch of road that fills most of Tarent. It will take me to Mercer Street, at the center of town, a block from my office. My father was like that, with the windshield and all. He was used to getting his way and making a point in doing so.

  When I was nine months old he quite suddenly moved the family from Des Moines, Iowa, to Lakeshire, Ohio, outside Cleveland, and in the twenty-six years that followed he served as the men’s head basketball coach at Eastern Ohio University. He took the Eagles to fourteen straight NCAA basketball tournaments, eighteen overall. He also won a national championship, in 1979, and was runner-up two other times. I have his national championship ring in a blue velvet box at the back of my underwear drawer, along with a St. Michael’s medallion that was given to him when he was born, and a knuckle of mashed gold—unrecognizable as his wedding band. It had once gotten caught in a lawnmower, along with his finger, and he never bothered to have it restored.

  World’s Loudest Frog reads the cardboard sign, written in dark green marker and stapled to the side of a small wooden crate resting near the walkway to my office. A thin-limbed boy is kneeling in lemon grass, stroking the aforementioned fro
g with his bony fingers.

  “He’s not feeling so good,” says the boy as I pause before passing.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Gave him too many crickets. He likes water bugs better.”

  “He’s loud, though, huh?”

  The boy curls his lower lip and shrugs.

  “Loud enough, I guess.”

  Richard Blyth, Harper’s older brother and the senior member of the firm, is sitting on a couch in our office’s waiting room, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. He has a magazine butterflied open across his lap and when I walk in he looks up and nods.

  “Good morning, Gordon,” he says, taking a long swallow from his cup.

  I smile and pass, plucking two yellow message slips from the rack beside our secretary Mary’s desk.

  “Wait, I’m just finishing another,” Mary says. She puts down her pen and waves the ink dry before surrendering the slip. “It’s from Joyce Ives. She also called right after you left last night, said she was going to get you at home.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “Good,” Mary says, folding her arms across her chest. “She sure can be bothersome.”

  I tell Mary she is right and then head down the hallway, peeking into Harper’s office. He is on the phone, but he motions me in, raising an index finger to let me know that he’ll only be a minute. On the far wall, there is a framed painting of a girl lying alone in a large maize-colored field. Harper had a similar print hanging above his bed in law school, and whenever I went over to his room, I imagined that the picture must be what Kansas looked like—that it reminded Harper of home. But, actually, Kansas doesn’t look much like the picture at all. At least not the parts of Kansas I’ve seen. Kansas is not nearly as flat, and it’s a lot greener.

  Harper hangs up the phone and then leans back into his chair, locking his fingers behind his head.

  “I want you to do something for me,” he says. “I want you to take Joyce Ives’s case.”

  My lungs fill several times before I respond. “We talked about this. As a matter of fact, you’re the one who told me that I’d be crazy if I did take it.”

  “I know, I know. But do me this favor: call her—talk to her. Tell her you’ll take it.”

  “Harper, you know this case? She’s insane. Her husband was cheating on her with a waitress at Gooland’s, so Joyce followed him there, on his lunch hour or something, and then drove her car through the fuckin’ front of the restaurant. Not only is she not willing to pay for the damages she caused to Gooland’s—which, I understand, is in the neighborhood of twelve thousand dollars—but she’s suing to recoup her costs for the crushed car and for money she spent on hospital bills. From what I hear, she suffered a pinched nerve in her neck and lacerations to her face when a couple of cinder blocks shattered her windshield.”

  Harper removes a cigar from a polished mahogany humidor on the corner of his desk. He pulls a black clipper from his top drawer and snips off the end of the cigar, brushing the thumbnail-sized nub onto the floor.

  “This is not a good case,” he says, rolling the cigar against the center of his tongue, forming a saliva-filled trough. “I am certainly aware of that. But do this for me. I have my reasons.”

  “Are you going to tell me what those reasons are?”

  Harper holds the cigar gently between his teeth, moving the flame of an orb-shaped lighter toward the blunt tip.

  “I will,” he answers, making the word “will” sound more like “with” as his tongue knocks against the soft butt of the cigar. “Just not yet.” His face disappears behind a funnel of smoke and I move toward the doorway, turning back before I leave.

  “What’s your brother doing in the waiting room?” I ask.

  “He’s reading. Buster Horry complained to him the other day about our assortment of magazines, said there were too many for women. Richard said they were divided evenly, fifty-fifty. But it seems Buster categorizes any publication that doesn’t solicit advertising for manure spreaders as being for women.”

  An enormous piece of clear plastic is held by uneven sections of silver duct tape over the outside wall of Gooland’s. It shields a hole roughly the size of a Dodge Dart. A small piece of the plastic is dog-eared above the upper left-hand corner, winking in the breeze. High, away from the damage, a wooden sign spells out Gooland’s vertically, from top to bottom, in red block letters. At its base, in horizontal blue cursive, it says: Breakfast Served Anytime. Inside, a space heater rests beside the unwanted opening, its coil red-faced and throbbing. A long linoleum counter bisects the far end of the restaurant, behind seven swivel-top stools. Eight tables are pressed tight against the side walls—four on each side—and six more tables are arranged about center-floor. Squeezed into white polyester, a waitress leans against the cash register while leafing through the newspaper. Only a couple of the tables are occupied.

  I sit at the counter and another waitress appears from the kitchen. She is wearing the same dress as the first waitress, but she has a thick cardigan sweater overtop.

  “Coffee?” she asks.

  I nod and place my briefcase on the stool at my right.

  “Eggs are good today. The new grill’s just broken in,” she says, placing a saucer and cup in front of me and filling it with coffee. “For the first few days everything tasted sort of funny—metallic.”

  She sets a folded napkin on the counter. “Let me get you some silver. We just did a set.”

  My father ate breakfast most mornings of his adult life in a diner much like Gooland’s. It was perched on a sleepy ridge overlooking Lake Erie, and on more than one occasion I heard him say to Sara, the restaurant’s proprietor and chief cook, that the best thing that could happen to the old place was for it to crumble off the side of the earth and dissolve into the lake. After hearing this, oftentimes Sara would come out from behind the plasterboard wall that separated the kitchen from the eating area, and shove my father against the inside of his corner booth. She would settle down next to him, her apron hiked up above her dimpled brown knees, and explain why it wouldn’t do to have her restaurant resting beneath the waves. She would always finish by saying, “ ‘Sides, Hap, if this place wasn’t here, you’d have nowhere to go.”

  The waitress comes back, wiping the silverware dry with a cloth napkin before laying it out. I stir cream into my coffee with the still-warm teaspoon and ask to see the manager.

  “Is there something wrong? You ain’t had nothing but coffee.”

  “No, everything’s fine. Business.”

  Frankie Larch is tall with stooped shoulders and a narrow, crooked spine that cups slightly below his neck. He comes out from a small office behind the kitchen and takes the stool at my left, swinging his long legs away from the counter and into the center of the restaurant. He is wearing a newly pressed blue button-down and khaki slacks that pull up an inch or so too short. He touches a lonely patch of stubble at the base of his chin, brushing it with his fingertips as if willing it to expand and cover the rest of his face.

  “Gordon,” he says, nodding. “I knew you’d be out here sooner or later. She told me you’d probably be handling this for her.”

  I shrug and turn to retrieve my briefcase.

  “Hey, I understand it’s only business. So I won’t hold it against you. But to be perfectly honest, I don’t think you’re gonna do too well with this one.”

  “You know, Frankie,” I start, removing a yellow legal pad. “I think a lot of people feel that way.”

  Frankie inherited the restaurant from his mother, Ellen Gooland. He has been running it pretty steadily for nearly ten years without much trouble, until Joyce Ives. The two of us get up and move over to a side table, the waitress bringing me a fresh cup of coffee and Frankie a glass of Pepsi.

  “Rob was seeing one of my waitresses—Carol,” Frankie says, looking over his shoulder. “She ain’t here now. But Rob had been coming in real regular during her shifts, for about six months or so. I figured everyone knew—I mea
n, it’s not like they acted hush-hush. Christ, I saw them holding hands a bunch of times. They even kissed each other goodbye—depending on who was around.”

  “Did you ever say anything to Carol?” I ask.

  “Naw. It’s none of my business who she sees and who she don’t. As long as she shows up on time and does a good job.”

  Frankie removes a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and offers me one, lighting both cigarettes with the same match. I inhale deeply and after several seconds begin to feel a rush.

  “So, tell me about that afternoon.”

  “Well, there ain’t really all that much to tell. I was standing”—he pauses and turns, pointing toward a glass case beside the cash register that holds mostly chewing gum, candy bars, and cheap cigars—“there. I remember I was talking to Kyle Freeder about this new television set he got. And all of a sudden I hear this grinding noise—actually, it was more of a scraping. Like a snowplow on hard pavement. After that, the whole wall comes in with the front end of her Dodge.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Before or after Rob pissed in his pants?” Frankie says, grinning. “No. Really, I’m not sure. I remember Joyce getting out, real calm-like. At that point I thought she might have had an accident, that something may have gone wrong with the car. But it was pretty quiet.” He lights another cigarette with the stub of his last. “You could hear some pieces of glass falling and things settling, but it was basically quiet. Joyce walked over to Rob, plain as pancakes, and said, ‘I saw you from outside.’ She handed him the keys and said, ‘You can drive it home, when you come to get your things.’ And that’s it. She turned and left—Rob just standing there with the car keys hanging from his finger.”

  I sigh, clipping my pen to the legal pad and returning them both to my briefcase.

  “There were a good many people in here. We’re real lucky no one was hurt.”