4
THE WIND WAS still blowing as Peter drove along Chapman Avenue, over Orange Hill and down into the suburbs. He turned on the radio, punched through the buttons without listening to anything, and then turned the radio off again. There was something familiar and comforting this morning about the billboards and telephone poles and housing tracts, something safe and predictable.
From the top of the dashboard, he picked up the flute he had found on the parlor floor. It belonged to his son David. Peter had bought it for him in Louisiana a year or so ago. Last Sunday David had brought the flute out to the canyon and had spent half the afternoon messing around with it, getting down the first few phrases of “The Merry Old Land of Oz.”
So, what had happened? David had dropped it and then gone off without it? But then it would have been lying on the floor throughout the week, in plain sight.
There must be some easy answer. Perhaps David had laid it down on the fireplace mantel and forgotten about it. Maybe the wind, or a rat, had knocked it off onto the floor. That was probably it—rats. Rats were to blame for everything—the appearance of the flute, the hallucination, the crying in the woods, the coffee burning. No doubt rats had also stolen the pocket watch that Peter had left lying on the front porch railing the night before last. The mayor of the rats was wearing it now, tucked into a vest pocket.
A car horn honked behind him, and he realized that he was driving far too slowly, paying no attention. He sped up, thinking suddenly about Beth and about their talk that morning. The words “confirmed monogamist” rang in his ears again, as jarringly off-key as the flute on the parlor floor. In a way he had meant the phrase to be funny, but instead he had sounded a little too much like someone striking a holier-than-thou pose, choosing, as Beth had put it, to be offended by something. He hadn’t looked at it that way before. It was almost always easier just to blame your wife.
He and Amanda had agreed to share custody of David, who was ten now. Peter’s move to the canyon was the one thing in the business that bothered Amanda. She could understand Peter’s wanting to live like a hermit, but David, she said, needed more. David wasn’t always easy. He could be moody, and in the last year or so, what with the breakup and Peter’s moving out, he had gone through a sullen phase. Peter’s attempts to fix things with him too often brought silence and shrugs.
On impulse he pulled into the parking lot of a Sprouse Reitz dime store. There were eucalyptus trees and fall flowers growing in newly built concrete planters, and the stores had a recently tacked-on pastel facade. Peter was surprised to find that he couldn’t remember when the place had got a face-lift.
Inside the dime store, things were the same as ever. The air smelled of yardage and popcorn. Near the door there were bins of Halloween candy and racks of plastic masks and wigs and skeleton suits. He looked the stuff over, tempted to buy one of the skinny rubber chickens that hung by its feet from a clothespin. A woman about seventy years old, very neatly dressed and with purple-gray hair, stood at the only open register a few feet away. She smiled at him when he inspected the chickens, as if she thought they were funny, too.
It seemed to him that a dime store wouldn’t be a half bad place to work, wandering around with a feather duster among knickknacks and bolts of brightly colored cloth, sticking price tags onto glass tumblers and pincushions and putting in a few hours at the register, shooting the breeze with the occasional customer. It was a sort of haven built of trinkets, a never-never land where you watched the world slip past beyond plate glass windows. You could live back in the stockroom among the cardboard cartons, resting your feet on an old desk covered with invoices and with pens advertising wholesale dry goods.
He caught sight of himself in the mirrored backdrop of a jewelry display, and with his fingers he smoothed out his wind-mussed hair. Yesterday evening Beth had told him that shaving his mustache had made him resemble Gene Kelly and then had tried to get him to dance with her to a tape of old Motown songs on the portable cassette player. It turned out that shaving his mustache didn’t make any difference at all. He still could dance only a sort of two-step that Beth finally began to refer to as the “Clod.” Gene Kelly, though … He was built about right, although he was a little tall. He tried smiling at himself in the mirror. Well, maybe with a hat and umbrella, kicking through a puddle …
He gave up and walked toward the rear of the store where there were two long counters full of toys, most of them tossed together, some of the packages ripped open. Peter picked through them, flipping a Nerf football in his hand. The football wasn’t enough; there probably wasn’t a kid alive who didn’t already have one. He found a rubber stack of pancakes wearing a hat and carrying a submachine gun, plenty weird enough to impress the modern child, but he decided he didn’t want that, either.
Then, sorting through a row of plastic revolvers, by accident he found just the thing—something called a Spud Gun, a pistol that shot pieces of raw potato. There were two of them, dusty and lonely, misplaced behind the six-shooters as if they had been forgotten there in some more innocent age. Raised plastic letters spelled out the word “Spuderrific” on the barrel, and there were instructions on the back for loading the things with potato plugs. Feeling lucky now, he took them up to the counter and handed them to the checker, who pretended to be surprised.
“Robbing the bank?” she asked.
“Brink’s truck,” Peter said.
“I got one of these for my grandson,” she said. “When he was six or seven.”
“Did he like it?”
“He loved it,” she said. “His mother wasn’t crazy about it, though.”
Peter hadn’t thought about that—hundreds of little potato globs stuck to the kitchen wall. It was too late now, though. The deal was done. She counted out his change and put the guns in a bag, stapling the top shut through the receipt.
“How old is your son?” she asked, as if she wanted to chat, to hold him there a moment longer.
“One’s ten and the other’s six,” Peter said, which was only a small lie, since Bobby wasn’t his son at all yet. Suddenly full of unanswered questions, he thanked the woman and walked out into the wind.