James "Jimmy" Easter had been a chef in the East Village. Probably knew his way around a pork belly tart. His wife was in sales, medical supplies. Jimmy Easter, there was the name, Jimmy Easter, the missing piece that should have connected it all, me out with the stroller, always the lighter-framed of our two Maclarens, not because it weighed less but because it was cleaner and there was something unmanly about pushing the filthier stroller, with its crumbed seams and yogurt-smeared handles and pockets stuffed with rotten apple cores (not that I ever cleaned the thing), and the friendly neighbor with his cigarette and his children and their mud-crusted playhouse. Except the name connected nothing. Easter was too much. It crowded out what mattered.
There was also the question of the car, the compact Korean-made tomb of the Easters. Had I ever seen it? Probably parked out back. Maybe Jimmy paid his landlord for a space. A monthly strain, this extra. And Jimmy with his cigarettes, even after the mayor jacked the tax, Jimmy still with his cigarettes and the smoke he tried to wave away. What kind of father would smoke around his children, or smoke at all? Not the kind of father the mayor would consider a father. Nobody committed to effective parenting. Did Jimmy have life insurance? Would his death from lung cancer at least pay out?
But these questions, these accusations in the form of questions, they really stopped being pertinent one blue afternoon in October in a southbound lane on the BQE. The semi took care of these questions, or really issues, let's call them issues, much as many of us not my mother claim to despise the word. It took care of the unemployment issue, the parking space issue, the smoking issue, and it took care of James "Jimmy" and Barbara Easter's issue, Devin and Charlene. The truck, the sleep-starved Croat at the wheel of it, took care of everything. Jimmy Easter might just as well have taught his children how to blow smoke rings, or steal cigarettes. Jimmy Easter was off the hook. He would never go down in history, or case history, as a shitty father.
Whereas me, I still had a decent shot.
Nearly every day now I passed the man's house, that yard. The playhouse was gone, but there were still some ancient cigarette butts wedged between the sidewalk and the first flagstone of the walkway, and often as I passed I whispered, "Jimmy Easter, Jimmy Easter, Jimmy Easter," until the name conjured nothing, failed to spook. But then I would very nearly see the boy and the girl in their sweatshirts, climbing through the grimed window of the playhouse, and I would feel a jangled shiver, like shaves of ice in the blood, which was maybe just my nerves trying to shield me, to throw up some farce of hauntedness, of spirits lingering, to save me from the brute fact of their oblivion.
Nine
Late, I sprinted through drab, tidy streets toward Christine's. Her brick two-family was an exact replica of every other house around here, including mine. Much as I feared the advent of the me's, architecture alone was against it. There weren't enough lofts or factory floors. Kids needed big, decrepit spaces for their parties and orgies and suicidal Sunday afternoons. The buildings in these precincts had been designed for only one thing: to house, and disguise, the fester of families.
When I reached Christine's I was sweating, heaving. I could have used a nice vomit. I should join a gym, I thought. But then I'd just vomit in it.
Christine's brother sat in a canvas chair in the driveway. Nick had the build and the hair of a picture-book giant, a merry bipolar glint in his eye. He worked occasional construction jobs and sometimes held down the day-care fort while Christine cruised the borough in her minivan.
Nick nodded, waved. The pink plastic rifle in his lap had leaked, wetted his tracksuit pants. Frantic children danced around him, screamed, struck Nick with lengths of garden hose. Nick raised his rifle, launched dark ropes of liquid at the more brazen tykes.
"Gun me!" said one kid.
"I'm poopy man!" called another.
Bernie appeared to be absent from this frolic.
"Milo," said Nick. "How you doing?"
"Good," I said, ducked a late burst of crimson spray. "Just here for Bernie."
"No, I know," said Nick.
"Have you seen him?"
"What?" said Nick. "Yeah, sure. But first, I was just thinking. How would you like to make some money?"
Nick lowered his rifle, looked over at the boys still cowering from his fusillade.
"Go play with those wood scraps near the garage," he called.
"Sure, I'd love to make some money," I said. "Money is one of my favorite things to make. But I should really find Bernie right now."
"Yeah, no, go ahead, guy. Just that I got this deck job at the end of the week and my assistant crapped out on me. I need a helper."
"Deck job?"
"I build decks. Like off the back of a house?"
"Got it."
"Interested?"
"Ah, maybe," I said. "I'm pretty busy. Can I let you know? I'll let you know."
There was a whiff of the volatile about this man that always put me in modes of appeasement, of friendly deferral.
"Yeah," said Nick. "Let me know."
"I will, I promise. I'll let you know."
"Good. It's a deal."
"What's a deal?"
"You letting me know."
"Yes, that's a deal. Have you seen my kid?"
Nick tilted his head, a new shine in his eyes.
"Your kid? Is it one of these little homos?"
He swiveled in his chair, opened up once more on the boys where they crouched near the ruins of a doghouse.
"Soup's on, motherlovers!"
What he shot at them, I realized now, was some variant of Vitamin Drink. The children squealed and dove into the splintered wood.
"No, not one of these particular little homos," I said, jogged past Nick and climbed the side staircase.
The house was low-ceilinged and dark and as I crept through the kitchen I could almost have been some Hollywood SEAL with a pistol in my hand, an avuncular sergeant in my earbud. I could almost have been any one of the righteous manhunters I'd portrayed in cramped hallways since boyhood, but I was not, felt the dull sear of that notness now.
More howls broke through the roar of a television as I turned into a carpeted parlor, slunk past a flimsy rack of cut-glass bowls, china dolls, and other sad lady collectibles, toward the light of a dusty bay window.
I knew this room from past pickups and now I felt an odd flutter in my gut. Bernie could be facedown in the shag, choking on a cherry sucker from that quartz dish on Christine's coffee table. No longer the high-tech avenger, I'd end up a different character in the same Hollywood movie, the stunned father with his kid's limp corpse in his arms, the collateral damage cutaway.
But Bernie had not choked on a sucker. Bernie was not dead in the shag. Bernie was chewing another boy's penis. The boy screamed as my son gnawed denim. Hunched before the giant TV, where a prelapsarian New York Yankees highlight reel looped swank Jeterian feats, the boys, in their backlit shadow-play agon, jerked like Mrs. Cooley's beloved Balinese puppets.
"Daddy!" shouted Bernie, lifted his head from the drool-dark pants of his prey.
"Hey, little man," I said. "Ready to go home?"
Bernie hopped up, did his funny lope across the room.
"Say goodbye to Aiden," I said, recognized the other boy now, the rabbit-eyed only of another Christine regular, a single mom who sold cell phone plans from a storefront on Ditmars Avenue.
"Bye," said Bernie.
"Bye," called Aiden, perhaps distracted by the swell of martial melodies surging from the plasma. Blue Angels navy fighters streaked over old Yankee Stadium, the bond forged between two of the best-funded teams of their time.