“Well, Louis is a good kid,” his father continued. “I’m sure things’ll work out. If there’s any real problem, I’m sure it’ll come out.”
“Walt,” his mother warned. Even she sensed some sort of thin ice.
“Yeah, there’s a problem,” Dom said. He was drunk, and angry. Biddy was gradually beginning to perceive that the car was a hideous trap of a sort, eight people in a locked closet with an explosive. “There’s a problem all right. The problem is he still doesn’t have a job.” There was a silence, Biddy holding Kristi more tightly on his lap as if to protect her physically from the awfulness of the situation. They had passed the airport minutes ago, and the blue-and-white Cessna had stood out, tail erect and wings catching light. Biddy’s father had been promising to find Louis a part-time job for thirteen months. He had not succeeded.
“Look. I’ve told you I’ve been working on it.”
“Yeah, you’re working on it. Meanwhile the kid stays home and begins to wonder if retards ever get jobs in this world.”
“Dom,” Ginnie said.
“He’s working on it. The kid tells her he can’t go to the wedding, he feels like a bum, he’s not working. We tell him he’s still a student, he don’t want to hear it. All he knows is that he’s been trying to get a job for over a year. And he wants to work at Sikorsky. Anywhere. Don’t ask me why. He likes Walter here.”
“I told you these things don’t happen overnight,” his father said, also angry. “They’re not hiring. We’re all in the same boat.”
“No. You’re in the boat. He’s in the water,” Dom said. Biddy wanted to jump out of the car. “Yeah, times’re tough. You’re working your fingers to the bone for him.”
They drove the rest of the way in silence and let the Lirianos out at Ryegate Terrace. As they drove away, Biddy closed his eyes and tried prematurely to begin the process of ending, once and for all, a day that had already dragged on for far too long.
With the sunlight mirrored in undulating patterns on the water ahead of him, he cruised just on the surface, the lower half of his mask below the water and the upper half above, the waterline wavering across the glass in front of his eyes like the bubble in a level. He struck out straight from shore and dipped down with the control of a sand shark, slipping through the colder water near the bottom and leveling out just above the sand, kicking hard and gazing at the various tiny landmarks of the sea floor as they reeled by.
He was in a thermocline, and the effect was striking: six inches above his head, the water, markedly warmer, held so many particles in suspension it seemed opaque, and the separation was so distinct the effect was that of a brown ceiling, a long, low tunnel, brown sand inches below him, brown water no less penetrable to the eye above him. Through it he soared, kicking away from the land with still plenty of air in his lungs, the water itself a corridor for him, showing him a way, setting him on a specific track.
Taking Off
Things are not the way they should be. I keep complaining, and Kristi’s right: I’m too scared to do anything about it. We have to be better to each other, and we’re not. We have to think about each other, and we don’t. I don’t do enough and what I do doesn’t work. If I’m not such a fool, I should prove it. Things get worse and worse, and doing something isn’t so scary anymore. I’ve been playing kids’ games all this time like it would help and it won’t. All that planning and work I was doing and I just had to ask myself: Who are you kidding? Really, who are you kidding? Because I knew I was just playing games. I knew then that I had to make it real and not chicken out, to stop being such a baby about everything. Who was going to help me if I didn’t? Who was going to change me if I couldn’t? I think if you don’t do something about things you don’t like, you get what you deserve. I’ve been stupid all along. When my father told me either to shit or get off the pot, I should have listened. He was right.
A cardinal lighted nearby, a marvelous red against the backdrop of green, and was gone, the branch swaying in its absence. Biddy sat on the corner of the cellar door in the backyard, the dog’s leash in his hand. The dog was in the house. He thought about nothing. Flies crisscrossed over the tomato plants in the garden. There was no reason for him to be holding the leash.
His father was cutting the grass. The engine housing on the lawn mower was loose and it added immeasurably to the racket. The mower crossed back and forth before him, edging nearer each time, his father trudging along behind, arms sweaty and flecked with grass.
A newspaper lay near his foot, luminous in the sun. In it Biddy had read how to come up with cool alternatives to summer suppers and had seen a UPI photo of a German shepherd curled on the shoulder of a highway near its mate. Its mate, one leg sprawled at an odd angle, was dead. The caption, entitled “Lonely Vigil,” related that the dog had refused food for three days. The lawn mower rolled to the side of his foot and stopped.
“Lift your feet,” his father said. He lifted his feet.
His father bent over the engine housing, and the mower idled down and went off, the blades spinning with an empty, stuttering sound. He pushed it a few feet away and sat down.
“Little distracted today?” he asked, looking at the mower as though it bothered him.
“Mmm.”
His father shook his head, sweeping grass from his pants. “Biddy and his magic violin.” He sighed.
Biddy looked at him. “Where’d you get that?” he asked. “What’s that mean?” His father had used it for years and it had always seemed a kind of nonsense or catchphrase, interesting or funny, if at all, only in its meaninglessness.
“Get what?”
“That—‘magic violin.’”
He seemed startled by the question. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s years and years old.” A distant lawn mower started, a ghostly echo of the one silent before them. “Maybe it was a lead-in to a radio show.”
“You don’t remember?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what the big interest here is, either,” he said. He squinted as if the outlines of the memory were taking shape in the hazy sky to the north. “I have an impression of an all-girl orchestra, for some reason, but I’m not sure. They’d introduce them in those days like they did more than just play or perform, like they did magic things with their instruments.” He rubbed his nose. “What was funny was that they were usually terrible. You know, Joe Blow and his magic xylo-phone. I guess I just remembered somebody with their magic violin.”
Biddy spread his toes in the grass, tearing up strands.
His father stood, flapping the back of his shirt to cool himself. “That’s the best I can do, guy. Try and make sense out of everything that comes out of your old man’s mouth and you’ll really be in trouble.”
He bent over the mower to restart it while Biddy wrapped the dog’s leash around his arm, rolling it tightly in an idle attempt to create the effect of chain mail. His arm from wrist to elbow wrapped in metal, he got up and returned to the house, testing his new armor by banging it against the drainpipe on the way in.
That Wednesday the report card came: they sat in their chairs, twenty-eight shining examples of self-control, while Sister called their names, one by one, alphabetically. And one by one, alphabetically, they went up to receive their card, thanked Sister, returned to their seats, took a breath, girded themselves, and opened it. Biddy, an “S,” was near the end. Every student, having watched others before him, tried to keep a poker face; every student failed. Teddy Bell had been one of the first, and after sitting down he’d given a stifled cry as if he’d been bitten.