Onward Toward What We're Going Toward Read online

  Chic reached down and grabbed the binoculars, setting them on his lap to cover his open fly.

  “Isn’t that your brother’s house?” Sheriff Hewitt asked.

  “My brother asked me to . . . ah . . . keep an eye on his house. He’s out of town.”

  “Uh-huh.” Sheriff Hewitt stared at Chic, a hard glare, piercing. He was holding his nightstick in front of him like he was about ready to whack something. “Are you sure you weren’t peeping in the window at your brother’s wife? The foreign woman.”

  “What? No. I wasn’t . . . not at all.”

  Sheriff Hewitt nodded. “I’ll let you go about your business this time. But don’t think I’m not going to remember this, Waldbeeser.”

  In his rearview mirror, Chic watched Sheriff Hewitt walk back to his police car. He quickly zipped his fly. As Sheriff Hewitt slowly drove by, he pointed to his eyes with his index and middle fingers to show Chic that he’d be watching him. Then he took a left at the corner and was gone.

  Chic was shaking. Before he started the car, he suddenly remembered a time when he was seven. He and Buddy were upstairs playing sock ball, a game played with a wadded-up pair of socks. The point of the game was to hit the other person with the wadded up pair of socks. The wrinkle was the person without the sock ball was allowed to hide anywhere in the house, and the person with the sock ball had to count to ten before starting his search. On this afternoon, Chic had the sock ball. After counting to ten, he went off in search of his brother. He first checked under Buddy’s bed (his favorite place to hide), but he wasn’t there. He then went out into the hallway and checked the linen closet next to the bathroom, throwing the door open and standing there poised with the sock ball cocked ready to throw. But Buddy wasn’t in the linen closet—he was behind the bathroom door, and right after Chic threw open the linen closet door, Buddy decided to make a break for it. He charged out of the bathroom, running the opposite way down the hall toward the master bedroom and the stairs that led to the living room below. Chic slammed the linen closet door shut, causing their mother downstairs in the kitchen to yell, “Don’t slam the doors!” He took two steps in pursuit of his brother, then thinking better of chasing after him, stopped. Buddy was trapped between Chic and their parents’ closed bedroom door. His only escape route was the stairs, and as soon as Chic wound up to throw the sock ball, Buddy dove for them. He slipped, however, and ended up taking a head-over-heels tumble down the stairs, a crashing somersault that made so much noise their mother set down the spoon she was using to measure vanilla extract and raced out of the kitchen. Buddy ended up on his back at the bottom of the stairs, a few feet from their father, who looked away from the window to Buddy at the exact moment that Chic reached the last step and dropped the sock ball on Buddy’s chest and said, “You’re it.” His father smiled, a smile that Chic felt all the way to the bottom of his feet. The smile was quick but it had happened; Chic knew it had happened; then it was over, just like that, and his father went back to the window, and their mother came rushing into the living room to attend to Buddy who was beginning to cry, and Chic continued to stand there staring at his father and wondering what he could possibly be looking at out that window.

  Chic started the car, and the engine roared to life. He looked over at his brother’s house one last time. The drapes were pulled open, and Lijy was standing in the window. She held a mug; her lips were perfectly straight. A wave of fright rushed through his body, a sensation like hearing an unexpected noise in a dark house. He fumbled with the car’s gearshift as she waved to him, holding up a hand in a sad hello. Chic ignored her wave. He pulled away from the curb and took a left—the same left Sheriff Hewitt had taken—and glanced in the rearview mirror to see Lijy still standing in the window, her left hand on the glass, perhaps, he thought, in an attempt to get him to stop.

  Green Geneseo

  June 12, 1998

  About ten miles outside of East Peoria, down Creve Coeur Avenue, near the car dealerships, on the banks of the Illinois River—on the other side of the river was Peoria’s skyline: the Jay Janssen Building, the Mark Twain Hotel, the Capital One building, the Peŕe Marquette—Green pulled into the parking lot of the Brazen Bull. He had passed the bar for the last week while driving Mary to the Pair-a-Dice. Just glancing at the place, even when crawling by on a road littered with stoplights and strip malls, Green noticed the structure had been home to a fast food restaurant in a former life, maybe a Hardee’s or an Arby’s. The building had huge, square windows on every side and a drive-through marquee, but those huge windows had been covered with sheets of plywood painted a park picnic table green, and the drive-through marquee had long since been abandoned and was now used as a storage area for a garbage Dumpster and empty beer kegs. An asphalt parking lot the size of an outfield spread out before the building, and at the turn-in off Creve Coeur Avenue was an overgrown landscape planter. In the middle of the planter, a large sign had sprouted up to announce to the drivers that there was a bar named the Brazen Bull offering happy hour from three to eight and all-you-can-eat hot wings on football Sundays, even though there hadn’t been a football Sunday in seven months. A bar with a big parking lot usually had big bathrooms. Bad things could happen in bathrooms, and this was one of the reasons Green had been avoiding the place. But this morning he had a raging headache and needed a drink. Besides, he thought he had this bookie thing figured out—all he had to do was be Green. It was that simple. Just be a guy at the bar. So, that’s what he was going to do, and this was where he was going to start.

  Days of Our Lives was playing on a television set at the end of the bar. (Green knew the program because Jane had watched it every day in the hospital.) Cigarette butts polka-dotted the scuffed wood floor, and a cloud of smoke hung over the pool table in the back, where two guys were loudly battling it out. Green ordered a vodka on the rocks from the bartender, a young girl wearing a Harley Davidson tank top. He added some lemon and sugar and took a sip. Not enough sugar, so he emptied another packet into the glass. He then turned to watch the game of pool. One of the players was a kid in his early twenties, wearing a pink polo shirt, the three buttons undone so that his hairless chest showed. The kid leaned over to take a cut shot, seven ball in the corner pocket—a lot of table, and Green knew it was a difficult shot. When the kid missed, Green tried to show that he was into the game, saying, “Oh, that was close.” The kid gave him the once-over, taking in the maroon suit and alligator-skin loafers. Green thought about what the other bookie had said about the suit. He held up his drink. “Nice try.”

  The kid turned his attention back to the table. He was playing against an older guy in a leather cowboy vest. The older guy sighted up a straight-in shot, the fourteen into the corner pocket.

  “You got money on this game?” Green shouted. “This a money bar?”

  The kid looked at Green. “You want next?”

  “I’m more of a basketball fan, actually. Professional basketball. The playoffs are happening right now. You a basketball fan? Like either of the teams tonight? Chicago or . . . whoever they’re playing.”

  “The Jazz.”

  “Right. So, you got a favorite?”

  The older guy, whom Green later found out everyone at the Brazen Bull called Eight Ball, pulled out of his shot and glared at Green. “Hey, hombre. You mind?”

  “Sorry.” Green sucked a sip of vodka from his straw.

  Eight Ball went back down on his shot, eyeing it up. He hit the cue ball with draw so that when it struck the fourteen and knocked it into the corner pocket, it reversed direction, as if it were on a string, and rolled backward so that it was in position for his next shot, the ten in the side pocket.

  “Nice shot.” Green turned around. “You got any aspirin, honey?” he asked the bartender.

  She ignored his question, engrossed in Days of Our Lives.

  “Excuse me. Do you have any aspirin?”

  “There’s a gas station down the highway sells aspirin,” she told Green witho
ut looking away from the television.

  A few minutes later, the pool game was over (Eight Ball won), and the kid took a stool next to Green and ordered a Miller Lite. The bartender got one from the reach-down refrigerator and in one fluid motion, cracked off the cap and set the bottle down on a coaster, then went back to staring at the television. The kid poured his beer into his tiny glass.

  “What are you doing in a place like this?” Green looked the kid up and down, taking in his pink shirt and acid-washed blue jeans and flip-flops.

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “Fair enough. My wife works up the road at the Pair-a-Dice. I just dropped her there. Thought I’d get a drink.”

  “At eleven in the morning?”

  Green shrugged. “What can I say? I was thirsty.”

  “This is the only place you can play pool for money. Only place I know. I’m Seth, by the way.” He held out his hand.

  “Nice to meet you, Seth.” Green wasn’t sure if he should give his name. He paused for a second, and decided not to give it. “So, Seth, you a gambler?”

  “I like winning money.”

  “You a basketball fan?” Behind Seth, Eight Ball was putting quarters in the pool table. “So, who do you like tonight? Chicago or Utah? Chicago is giving up three points.”

  “You a bookie?”

  “You a cop?”

  “Do I look like a cop?”

  “Do I look like a bookie?”

  “Not really. Not like a bookie from around here. I wouldn’t really know, though. I used to bet with a guy who lived on my dorm floor, freshman year. I haven’t in a while, though.” Seth took a drink of his Miller Lite. “What’s the over/under?”

  “Bet a winner. That’s where the true heart is. Chicago or Utah? Chicago’s giving three points.” Green stole a glance at the television. The Days of Our Lives theme music was playing, and the credits were rolling. “Tell you what, Seth . . . ” He motioned with his head toward the front door.

  Seth made a confused face. Green leaned in and whispered, “Meet me in the parking lot in five minutes. We’ll talk lines or over/under. Whatever you want to bet.”

  “Why don’t we . . . ” Seth motioned toward a hallway that led to the bathrooms. At the end of the hallway was a door that went out to a deck with tables and a view of the Peoria skyline across the river.

  “In the parking lot. Five minutes. I’ll be in the minivan.” Green slipped a five-dollar bill under his empty vodka glass. “Barkeep, honey.” The bartender looked at him, and Green was positive she’d been crying. “Thanks for your hospitality.”

  In the parking lot, Green climbed into his minivan. His head was pounding and the corner of his vision seemed to waver. But he wasn’t going to let a headache stop him. He was close to his first transaction, and it hadn’t been all that hard; it was only a matter of breaking the ice and getting the person, the booker—was that right, booker? er, no . . . the bettor, yeah, the bettor—getting the bettor to start talking. Green opened the glove compartment and took out a bottle of Tylenol. He dry-swallowed two capsules and leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He hadn’t felt like this, like a man, since he’d joined a gym the month after Jane died. While he strained through his reps, grunting, the complimentary trainer who that came with his six-month membership shouted, “Be a man. Come on. Be a man. Pump it out. Pump it out!” He was being a man again. He flexed his bicep and felt the hard bulge.

  After a few minutes, Seth came out of the bar. He scanned the parking lot, spotted the minivan, opened the passenger-side door, and hopped in. He took five twenties out of his hip pocket and told Green he wanted to bet the Jazz. “I like Karl Malone.”

  “Utah’s getting three.”

  “I’m a dog bettor. I like underdogs.”

  Green reached under the seat for his ledger. Bending over sent a jolt of pain up his left arm, through his neck, and into his left eye like someone had stuck a hotwire to the back of it. “Jesus Christ, I got a headache.”

  Lomax Waldbeeser

  1952ish

  Lomax’s earliest memory was of a long-haired, red-lipped being who picked him up and said high-pitched incomprehensible things into his face after he finished sucking what the long-haired, red-lipped being stuck in his mouth, and a pudgy-cheeked being with a deep voice, who stuck its head into his vision every time the long-haired, red-lipped being laid him down in a room that looked like it looked when he closed his eyes. The pudgy-cheeked being said incomprehensible things for long periods of time and gave him rectangular items whose corners he liked to stick in his mouth and gnaw on. After a while, some of the incomprehensible things began to be comprehensible; he learned that the long-haired, red-lipped being was his mother and the pudgy-cheeked being was his father, and that his mother liked to say, “I love you and Daddy loves you and Grandma and Grandpa von Schmidt love you and Grandma Waldbeeser loves you.” Although he’d never been held by Grandma Waldbeeser, his mother sometimes put a picture in front of his face and said, “Grandma Waldbeeser. She’s in a place called Florida with a man named Tom McNeeley.” Then his mother would touch his belly and say, “Goo-che-goo-che-goo,” and his father would stand behind his mother mumbling something about Grandma Waldbeeser not being something something something and storm out of the room.

  Chic Waldbeeser

  1952ish

  Since his run-in with Sheriff Hewitt, Chic had been a good guy. Anytime he started thinking about Lijy, he would wash his hands with hot water. Some days, he washed them seventeen or eighteen times, and as a result, they became dry and chapped. But it worked; he rarely thought about Lijy. Instead, his mind skipped to thoughts of his brother out on the road selling coins, and to his father, Bascom III sitting in the living room, staring out the window. His brother and father were one and the same, pretty much. Chic had a sense that something was wrong with them, like they were bearing crosses of infinite sadness. Maybe he had the cross, too, but Chic carried his differently. His cross was one of infinite denial. Push everything to the back of the mind. But he couldn’t always do that because his mind often went in directions he couldn’t control, though he tried. Oh, did he try. The worst thing was denying his feelings. He did everything he could not to feel. Do not feel. Feel nothing. Avoid feeling at all cost. Even when doing something that should evoke the epitome of feeling, the penultimate of feeling, the zenith of feeling, the top of the feeling mountain, like kneeling next to his son’s crib and looking over the top rail down on the sleeping boy on his stomach, sucking his thumb, Chic did not allow even the slightest, even the tiniest bit of feeling to wedge itself under the door that he’d closed on his emotions. But one evening, rubbing his son’s back while shushing him to sleep, Chic tried to feel something. If he was going to feel something, this was the time. Right now. He was going to concentrate and feel what he was feeling while he rubbed his son’s back. And what he felt . . . he felt . . . what did he feel? He tried harder. He felt . . . he felt like he was wearing a diving suit, one of those heavy, brass-helmet diving suits with an oxygen hose that uncoiled upward toward the water’s surface. In his diving suit, he was suspended in the water, floating. There was no sound. No smell. No feeling. Nothing. Just him inside a heavy diving suit, protected from everything. Even when rubbing his son’s back and shushing him to sleep.

  Chic & Lomax Waldbeeser

  1958ish

  Lomax grew up quickly, too quickly, and filled out to be a roundish boy, not quite fat, but not skinny, either. Even though the elementary school fashion of the time was slacks and a button-up shirt, he dressed like a college professor, with a tweed sport coat and a bowtie. When he was just seven, he won the Jefferson Elementary spelling bee. After he spelled the last word correctly—bildungsroman—he ran off the stage and demanded that his second-grade teacher, Mrs. Nelson, and the other students, who looked at Lomax like he was some sort of space creature, call him Dr. Lomax.

  Lomax carried a leather briefcase full of his great-great-grandfather’s note
books and unsent letters. The letters were written in German and addressed to Basom’s parents, but for some reason, a reason no one knew, they had never been sent. When he passed away, he willed them to his son, Bascom Jr., who never read them (since he didn’t know German), and before he passed away, he willed them to his son, Bascom III, who set them in the basement on a shelf next to some other not-worth-mentioning items to collect dust. Not long after his father’s suicide, Chic found the box and took it up to his bedroom. He picked through the letters (there were over a thousand) and stared in bewilderment at the strange language and sloppy penmanship. A few days after Lomax’s seventh birthday, Chic, for some reason, remembered the letters and dug them out of the attic and gave them to his son. Chic wasn’t sure why he had given the letters to Lomax—it just seemed like a fatherly thing to do.

  Being only seven, Lomax was too short to carry the briefcase properly, so for a time he dragged it behind him. At some point, he grew tired of dragging it (the constant dragging damaged the briefcase), so he took the rear wheels and axle off his Radio Flyer wagon and affixed them to the briefcase to create a contraption that predated the wheelie suitcase Brooks Walker would patent in 1976. Here’s the thing: even at the young age of seven, Lomax’s fuse had been lit. He had a destiny. He’d found the book Middleville, Illinois: Our Town, Our Lives, Our Story and seen the pictures of R. S. Archerbach and his sons. He wanted to be pictured in a book one day.

  Chic, on the other hand, wanted his son to be like every other red-blooded American boy. He tried to get him to watch Cubs’ games on the television, replicating Jack Brickhouse’s famous “Hey-hey,” home run call, but Lomax just sat on the couch ignoring the television and writing in a notebook. Chic also bought his son a baseball glove. Lomax, however, thought the glove was some sort of hat and put it on his head and sat down on his bedroom floor and opened the briefcase. “No, no,” Chic said. “It’s a glove.” He slipped it on his own hand and smacked the palm with his fist. “A baseball glove.”