The needle-nosed pliers Leo had bought for Ma and her friends to manipulate their minds and hands into better mental and motor health lay loosely spilled out of the Home Depot bag, apparently untouched. More interestingly, different, heavier tools-three wood-handled hammers, a handsaw, two silver adjustable wrenches, even Pa Brumsky’s huge pipe wrench-were scattered all over the floor.
Several twisted, smashed-in tray tables were propped against the wall, ruined.
I understood why Leo’s short aluminum baseball bat was lying on the snow outside. It was another tool, grabbed from the basement.
“Ma and her lady friends decided heavier implements would be more efficient?” I asked, summoning up my own smirk as I imagined the sounds such heavy weaponry must have made, whacking at tiny nonsplit nuts.
He ignored me. Pointing to the two vacuum cleaners, he asked, “Upright or canister?”
I took the upright, since it required less bending.
Even though the front room was tiny, it took a full twenty minutes because the two vacuum cleaners kept sending bits of shells and meat zinging in new directions. Finally, he shut off his vacuum and took a last look around. Leo’s five-six, and that day he looked every bit the perfect miniature of a general surveying the field of an earlier, disastrous battle.
“Movie night?” I asked.
“Movie night,” he agreed sadly, picking up an empty quart of vodka that had been kicked under a chair.
It had taken her less than a month, once Leo bought Ma the big-screen television, to discover soft cable porn. Only days after that, she found the harder, pay-per-view stuff. I could well imagine the rapid-fire chattering, in Polish, as Ma called her friends, all but one widows, with news of what could be summoned into her front room.
Gone was bingo at the church. Gone were rotating weekly bridge evenings. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays were now for new adventures, as Ma’s circle of septuagenarians and octogenarians tottered over to Casa Brumsky to witness the slicked contortions on Ma’s new TV.
I’d stumbled into one of those movie nights the previous summer. Eight old ladies sat primly in front of tray tables, sipping vodka from water glasses, munching from bowls of bridge mix, fried Wheat Chex, and prunes, staring at things on television they’d never previously dared discuss, in Polish, English, or any other language.
They’d looked up, red faced, when I knocked on the open screen door. The three that had walkers began banging their wheels on the floor, summoning Leo up from his basement office, where he’d taken to hiding on the nights when the girls came over. He charged up the gangway from the back of the house and yanked me off the front porch like I was explosive. He told me it was best to call before coming over; the girls liked privacy on movie nights.
“I still believe cracking the pistachios will spark them up a bit,” Leo said now.
“Don’t movie nights do that?”
He shook his head at my lack of vision. “I figured by the time they worked through the barrel of pistachios, they’d have improved their finger dexterity, loosened their shoulders and necks, and be thinking at warp speed.”
I gestured at the heavy tools lying on the sculpted brown carpet. “They thought faster than you, for sure.”
“Ma even got her meat tenderizer, the big square one she used to use on whole sides of beef. And someone messed up the garage, looking for Pa’s tire iron.”
“Your old baseball bat, too. It’s lying on the snow outside.”
“Jeez, you should have heard them, Dek. They sounded like a highway crew jackhammering a road.” He sighed. “Let’s bring coffee down to my office. Ma will be too embarrassed to show herself with you around.”
Leo’s office was directly under the living room. It must have been deafening, beneath a loud cloud of moaning porn stars, banging walkers, and falling wrenches.
Leo read my mind as always. “I couldn’t stand it and spent the night at Endora’s.” Endora was his girlfriend. An ex-model and current Newberry Library researcher, she was a head taller than he was, though both their heads possessed the same oversized IQ. She lived in a condo, downtown.
His office was furnished with mismatched furniture, files, and equipment and was always orderly and neat. He sat behind the ancient wood desk, and I took the huge green upholstered chair his father had died in, all those years before.
“Tell me about this new client that’s going to make you rich.” He took a yellow wood pencil from the cup on his desk and leaned back. Leo was amazingly dexterous and often walked a pencil up and down between his fingers.
“Offices in ten states. They’ve hinted that the twenty-eight hundred was just for openers, that there will be a retainer coming for a lot more work. Maybe I’ve hit a golden confluence-”
“Confluence?” he interrupted.
“Confluence. It means a joining of two or more streams, like-”
“I know what a confluence is, you jackass. I just can’t let you throw around such words as though they’re part of your regular vocabulary.”
“Confluence,” I went on. “Maybe I’ll have the dough to finish the turret and get my zoning changed just as yups are a-gathering right here in Rivertown-”
His landline phone rang. “Leo Brumsky,” he said, holding the receiver with his left hand as his right kept finger-walking the pencil.
I tuned him out and looked around the office. As always, there was no sign of any current project, but I knew there had to be several. Leo Brumsky was highly regarded in the auction world.
On display, though, was Bo Derek. The movie goddess from the late seventies looked back at me from a poster above the light table. She sat in the surf and wore only a thin blouse, mostly unbuttoned. The blouse was wet. It was why Leo bought the poster when he was in high school. It was still the only work in his, an art examiner’s, office. Even as adults, we agreed, it was all the art he needed.
The soft tap of his pencil hitting the tiled floor caught my ear.
“Snark?” His voice was higher than I’d ever heard.
I kept my eyes on Bo. The office had gone absolutely silent, except for Leo’s breathing. It had quickened.
A moment passed, then another. Then he spoke, in a voice that was disbelieving. “Speak up, will you? You’re whispering.”
I had to look. His normally pale face had gone absolutely white. He was staring at the blank place on the wall above his four-drawer file cabinets, seeing nothing.
“No. I ran into Tebbins, and he told me about you, and all, so I threw it out; I didn’t figure you’d want-” he said, his own voice now barely above a whisper. “I tell you: It’s gone.”
His free hand reached for another pencil. It snapped in his fist. He mumbled something that I couldn’t make out and hung up the phone.
“Who was that?”
His head didn’t move.
“Leo?” I said, louder.
He looked up at me, slowly, like his neck hurt.
“That first summer you were gone,” he said softly. “After first year of college…” His voice trailed away, and he again turned to look at the blank spot above the filing cabinets.
I remembered that summer. I’d left Rivertown at the end of the summer before, to begin college in Chicago, but really to get as far from Rivertown as I could afford. After freshman year, I stayed in the city because I had nowhere else to go. I took an early-morning summer session class, worked three part-time jobs, and waited for the memories to fade. A girl I’d known had died. For a time, I’d been suspected of killing her.
I’d never wanted to summon back those times, but now I realized Leo had never mentioned that summer, either, other than once he’d said he’d worked at the city’s municipal garage.
“Who called, Leo?”
His eyes were glass, unblinking, as he turned back to look at me.