MARCOS DONNELLY
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T |
UESDAY EVENING, Ronald Barr sat wifeless on the sofa in his darkened living room, sipping a glass of scotch and warm water. While he waited, he sketched histograms on graph paper: x-axis, timeline; y-axis, number of minutes Jessica spent away from home on weekdays outside of working hours. Last Thursday, 425 minutes; last Tuesday, 260 minutes; Monday before last, 315 minutes…
He never asked where she went, couldn’t bring himself to ask. She had stopped offering the excuses of evening faculty meetings at the elementary school and late conferences with parents from two-career homes.
Two-career homes. He and Jessica had been a two-career home just ten weeks ago. Now she had a career, he worked a job.
There had to be a pattern—control the variable, control the situation. He arranged the data as a pareto chart. Nothing. A scattergram correlating days of the week and the time she spent away. Nothing. A range graph, a deviation chart, a double bar-x control chart.
He sat tapping the pencil point against his wrist, then resorted to sketching a fishbone diagram for cause-effect analysis. He winced; low, very low for a statistician.
Ex-statistician.
• EFFECT: Wife spending excessive time away from home.
• DESIRED STATE: Wife’s time away from home brought under control.
• MAJOR CONTRIBUTING FACTORS:
Communication with wife
Appreciation shown to wife
Financial support of wife
Sexual relations with wife
Financial support. Not really significant. His current salary at her Uncle Luke’s garage was only a thousand less than his second-year salary had been at Resotech. He had balanced the difference by taking over her coupons and organizing them for cost efficiency.
Sex. Well, maybe. He’d only made love to her twice in the past four weeks. Just twice? He dug through his memory but couldn’t recall more than two times. It was, in fact, a variable he hadn’t yet taken into account.
Jessica arrived home at 10:17 P.M.
“Hello, Ronald.” Her voice had the chill in it.
He hid his statistics under a stack of invoices from Luke’s service station. Careful, he thought. Look casual.
“Hi, honey. You must be exhausted. About ready to hit the sack?”
She stared at him as she stepped out of her heels. She was quiet for a moment, and he was afraid she wouldn’t speak to him. That would be bad —broken communication, too many variables to bring under control.
But she did speak. “I was out until half past ten. Don’t you care where I was?”
Ronald breathed relief; there was still communication. She looked beautiful standing there in the foyer glaring at him, her straight red hair touching each shoulder of her white blouse, one strand tangled in the 33-inch gold chain he had given her on their 333-day wedding anniversary. He almost said so, that she looked beautiful, but a shiver of panic ran through him before he did. Too many variables.
“You were working, right?” he finally said. “You must want to go upstairs and kick back a little.” Don’t press her; that would cause tension. “Would you like a glass of wine?”
“Jesus, Ronald.” She threw her purse on the sofa. He walked to her and kissed her neck gently, grimacing for a second from the sharp taste of fresh perfume.
He tried to fashion a boyish grin. “What do you say we go upstairs together?”
Their lovemaking was brief, and she was silent. When it was over, she rolled away with her back to him. Ronald was certain she would start getting home on time.
* * * *
He should not have lost the position with Resotech Corp.
He could not have lost it.
Ronald Barr had been prepared the day the “Please report to Personnel” note came. The odds were in his favor. Of the 300 employees whom Resotech was laying off that afternoon for the statewide Reduction in Force, the top 205 had been from middle management. He was in the bottom third, the white-collar office workers who did real work for the company. Out of that group, he was part of the 44 percent who had completed a four-year college education. When he took into account that only 25 percent of Resotech employees with college degrees actually worked in the area of their undergraduate studies, and added to that certain emotional factors which couldn’t be readily calculated—he and Jessica had just closed on their first home, were planning to start a family, those sorts of things that would add a sympathetic nuance to his otherwise purely logical argument—it left him as one of about ten and a half employees who had a good shot at talking Personnel into reconsidering their termination.
Good odds, even if he took the liberty to round the half-employee up to the nearest whole number.
He was valuable; he was the one who could see the hidden variables. He had shown statistically that removing car stereos from the sales reps’ company cars would reduce speeding; tickets dropped 68 percent. He had demonstrated that the addition of hot cocoa and chicken soup to coffee vending machines would correlate significantly with employee honesty measures; petty theft of office supplies dropped 32 percent statewide.
He saw the variables; he could control any system. He should not have lost the position with Resotech Corp.
He could not have lost it.
* * * *
It was the Sunday morning after the Tuesday night that sex with Jessica hadn’t worked. Thursday and Friday evenings, she had stayed out until 9:28 p.m. and 10:12 p.m., respectively.
She sat down across the kitchen table from Ronald, cupping her hands around the sides of her coffee mug. She was quiet for a while, and then asked, “Don’t you care?”
Ronald kept sorting the Sunday-morning coupons. He set a 35-cent Charmin off to the left, and dug out the 35-cent Maxwell House from the unsorted pile. As he set it on top of the Charmin coupon, an article in the local section of the paper caught his eye: the Pittsfield district had just elected a third woman to its school board. The last time three women had been elected to the Pittsfield school board, he remembered, was January of 1982. The very next day, the Guinness world record for crawling had been broken in Newton Abbot, England. He would need to check tomorrow’s paper.
“Honey,” Jessica said. She reached across the table and set her hand on top of his. The tenderness in the touch felt like guilt. Good. Of course he cared. If she had any idea, if she was going to throw everything away— dammit, what right did she have to make him feel guilty for her actions?
Wrong approach. Control the situation, don’t become a variable.
He could control anything.
“I’ll get out of your uncle’s garage,” he said, establishing the communication. He fought the desire to pull his hand away. “I’ll get a white-collar job. It’s just a tight market now. I’ll keep trying, if only you’d be a little patient.”
She sat back in her chair and brushed a strand of loose red hair from her face. “I’m talking about us, Ronald. I didn’t say anything about the color of your collar. Do you really think I’m upset with you about your career status?”
He added a Cheerios coupon to the 35-cent pile. The way she kept the coupons in such disarray irritated him: 60-cent toilet tissue mixed together with 15-cent drain cleaner and 50-cent cleansers. In the last week he had managed to arrange most of them by descending value of discount. Sometimes she seemed as haphazard as the third graders she taught. But she was trying to be kind, at least, pretending that his career setback didn’t matter to her.
“Jessica, it’s a tight market.”
“You already said that.”
“Well, it is! The odds against me finding work—”
“Odds!” She shoved herself away from the table and walked to the sink. Ronald knew what she would do: (A) dump the coffee; (B) thrust the cup in the dishwater; (C) put her right hand on the refrigerator, standing with her back to him; (D) remain silent for ten to fifteen seconds; (E) produce an exaggerated sigh; and (F) turn to face him.
Which she did. Steps A through F, in that order, in that way. If he could figure her out down to her damned sighing…
“When I do get you to say something, all you talk about anymore are the odds, the numbers, the variables.” Her voice had become subdued and even. The chill was coming, and he knew it could last for days if he didn’t respond at her level. “Please, Ronald, can’t you just talk with me the way you used to?”
There was no way, no way he should be losing her.
He stood and took hold of her bathrobe sleeve. Without a word, he walked her through their living room and out the front door.
“The lawn,” he announced.
“Which you said you were going to weed yesterday.” Sarcasm; it was part of the chill.
“I was doing coupons.” He reached under the forsythia bush to the right of the front steps and pulled a stone from below its drooping branches.
“A stone.”
She crossed her arms.
“I’m going to throw this stone on that lawn. I want you to choose the one blade of grass that you think it will hit.”
She turned her back to him, so he walked a semicircle around her to see her face.
“Come on,” he said, “I’m trying to explain what I’m feeling. What blade of grass will it hit?”
She glanced sideways toward the lawn. “It’ll probably hit a weed.”
“Not probably! There is no such word as probably.” He smiled and nodded; just maybe she was understanding. He tossed the rock in a high arc and chased it onto the lawn, almost slipping once on the cold dew. “This one!” he shouted to her. He pulled a blade of grass from under the stone and ran back to the porch. “This was the one, Jessica! And there was no probability about it. The bend in my wrist, the angle of the trajectory, gravity, the wind, everything working together made it so this was the blade the stone hit. There was no chance involved!”
She set one hand lightly on his shoulder; the other was balled in a tight fist in front of her mouth, a gesture he didn’t recognize. He couldn’t tell if she had grasped everything he said, or whether she was still thinking it through.
“Jessica, nothing is pure chance. There are variables we haven’t discovered yet. But they exist, and if I find them I can control any situation.”
She wrapped her arms around him now, slowly, and set her head on his shoulder. He again found himself annoyed by her touch, by her breath against his neck; he again felt guilty for feeling annoyed. He couldn’t decide exactly what to do with his own arms. He continued to think about it. He had nothing else to say, he realized.
She pushed herself from him and ran into the house. She slammed the door. Ronald stood outside for two more hours, throwing the stone, seeing where it landed, throwing it again.
* * * *
Jessica’s Uncle Luke stepped into the back office at the garage during Ronald’s lunch break. Fumes from the cigar he clenched in his teeth filled the small room; Ronald looked up from the morning newspaper. He had been reading the article about the pair of teenagers in upstate New York who had just broken the world crawling record.
Luke hiked up his trousers across his belly. He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and squinted at the writing. “I think we might be getting low on spark plugs and brake pads. Could you order us some?”
“Sparks are due in at two o’clock today, Luke. Pads will be good for another twelve days. I’ve also ordered halogens for Chevys. We’ll run out of those next Thursday.”
Luke took off his John Deere cap and scratched his scalp, mussing the little hair he still had. He chuckled deeply. “Ronnie, it’s too bad you hate this place.”
Ronald sat up. “No, Luke, I don’t—”
“Don’t try to kid me, son. I understand. This just isn’t your sort of job.” He leaned on Ronald’s desk and flicked a cigar ash into an empty coffee cup. “Hell, if I were in your shoes, I’d feel stupid too.”
Ronald sat up a little straighter. “Stupid? Well, I—”
“Tell you what, though,” Luke went on, looking philosophical. “Don’t know how the hell you manage to run inventory so tight. You’ve cut down stock so much that I’ve got room to set up a fifth grease pit. Before I lose you to some corporation, you gotta show me how you figure it all out.”
Ronald leaned forward and pulled a manila file from the careful stacks on the desk. “Well, I used invoices from the past three years to plot control charts. It has to be done for each of our high-volume parts. Then I pick out the variations in each system, and I calculate upper and lower control limits. I can plot…” He glanced at Luke, whose intent expression resembled pain more than concentration.
“Well, anyway,” Ronald said, “I use math to guess what we’ll need.”
Luke nodded and set a hand on Ronald’s shoulder. “You’d be a millionaire at the racetrack,” he said.
Ronald set the open file on his desk. Of course it wasn’t just the math; that was the simpler part of it. The difficulty was developing a feel for the way things were linked in the universe, the hidden causes that were almost absurd. A butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing, gale-force winds result in Albany; a NASA technician throws his sandwich wrapper away in his partner’s wastebasket, a junk sinks off the coast of Taiwan. Finding the links, tracing the patterns… that was the formidable task.
Bernie rushed into the office, a five-dollar bill in his hand and Stan in tow. The smell of gasoline and body odor overpowered the cigar fumes, and Ronald felt the office closing in on him. Resotech had been a lot more spacious.
“Ronnie, how many air filters have I put in during the last six weeks?” Bernie asked, grinning. He turned to Stan and said, “Now listen close, wise ass.”
Ronald shook his head. Stan was the third sucker Bernie had taken on this bet. “Twenty-seven,” Ronald said without checking the back sales invoices.
Bernie stepped out a peculiar victory dance he saved for this particular bet and stuffed the five dollars in the breast pocket of his greasy blue coveralls. The two of them, Stan and Bernie, were a mismatched pair, Stan as bulky and awkward as Bernie was handsome and smooth.
Stan looked incredulous. “Hey, you guys set me up.”
Luke stepped back and rested an elbow on the file cabinet as Ronald pushed his chair from the desk to sit facing the two. He folded his hands on his lap and feigned patience while Bernie went through part two of the wager.
“Fine,” Bernie said, putting his hands in his coverall pockets, a devil-may-care stance. “Double or nothing he can do it with any part you’ve used.”
“Okay, you twerp bastard.” Stan grinned with confidence as he pulled another five from his wallet. “Double or nothing.” Bernie reached for the bill, but Stan balled it in his fist and glared. “How many PCV valves have I used?” he asked Ronald.
“Since when?”
“Uh… six weeks.”
“What type of PCV valve?”
Luke laughed; Stan was frowning. “All right, pal, just 892-C’s.”
Ronald sat back. Stan, six weeks, ninety-one invoices, 2.8 liter V6 autos only; piece of cake. “Fifteen.”
Stan looked blank. He unballed his fists and started counting on his fingers. Bernie snatched the second five, laughing. “You’re a fucking computer, Ronnie,” he said, slapping Ronald on the back. “Break down and join us at McCollough’s Pub and the first beer’s on me.”
Ronald nodded. “Yeah. Maybe.”
“All promises, but you never show,” Bernie said, shrugging. He grabbed Stan by the shoulders and pushed him out the door.
“Those boys won’t ever learn not to bet against Bernie,” Luke said. “Never seen the guy lose, but they’ll bet anyways. Never learn.” He sat on Ronald’s desk and put his cap back on. “So, tell me how my little Jessica’s going.”
Ronald looked down at his inventory control charts and traced an index finger along an upper control limit. “Great. Great.”
Luke rubbed a hand over the bristles on his chin. “Must be a happy little girl,” he said, his voice edged with something like suspicion and understanding improbably combined. “Every time I ask you that, I get two ‘greats’ in a row.”
Ronald felt the muscles tense in his lower back. “Well, she’s still teaching. She likes it.”
Variables. He’d exhausted the obvious. It wasn’t a standard correlation. Employee theft and hot cocoa. School boards and crawling records. Time away from home. And…
“Yeah,” Ronald said, retracing the inventory control lines. “She likes it.”
* * * *
He bolted upright in bed. “My God!” he said aloud, almost shouting.
Jessica stirred next to him but didn’t wake. He could barely make out her form in the darkness; he could hear her breathing and smell the wine.
He crawled from bed as quietly as he could and made his way downstairs. The numbers had been rearranging themselves in his head, balancing, contrasting, screaming for his attention until he awoke.
Once he turned on the living room lights, he arranged the minutes table for Jessica’s time away from home next to the inventory control parts for Luke’s garage.
Scattergram: an x/y axis chart that would show the correlation inherent in two recurring events, even if that correlation were improbable. Absurdly Hidden.
Fan belts showed no correlation.
Nor air filters.
Nor oil sales.
Spark plugs did, a correlation coefficient of .92, close to perfect. Then a T-test to be sure. As spark plug sales rose, Jessica’s time away from home lengthened; as they fell, so did her time away.
Spark plugs. And.
* * * *
Bernie leaned casually against the office doorway, flipping the last spark plug in the garage off his thumb, up in the air, and catching it. Replace the spark plug with a 50-cent piece, Ronald thought, and he’d look like an old-time con man.
Uncle Luke, on the other hand, was livid.
“What the hell do you mean you sent all the spark plugs back?”
Ronald shrugged and tried to ignore the feeling of a fist in his stomach. “I had to send them, Luke. The whole shipment was defective.”
Luke began pacing tight circles on the concrete floor, scratching furiously at his left armpit. “Well, Christ, Ronnie, how the hell do you know they were all defective? You didn’t test any of them. You wouldn’t even know how to put one in!”
Casual. Control. “They had some kind of, uh, goop. It was all over them and they smelled like acid or burnt rust or something. Any idiot could see they were useless.”
Luke had stopped pacing and was shifting helplessly from one foot to the other. “Aw, Christ, Ronnie. If we had extras in inventory there’d be no problem.”
Bernie broke in. “Boss, if you want me to go down and buy a load from Mobil—”
Ronald gripped the arms of his chair.
“Jesus,” Luke said. “Buy the goddamned things retail at triple markup? All right, all right, but just one case. Christ, Ronnie, I hope like hell you put a rush order on the new shipment.”
Ronald resumed breathing—he’d just realized he’d stopped. A single case would get Jessica home at 3:43. “Of course I ordered more, Luke. Should be here in two days.”
Luke winced, but seemed to be holding his temper. He turned around to Bernie. “Get Harris to rearrange the schedule. Move up everything he can that he knows needs sparks. Aw, Christ, customers are gonna be pissed.” He shuffled out of the office, muttering.
Bernie flashed an overly composed smile from the doorway. “Stan!” he called over his shoulder, and Ronald swiveled his chair to face the door.
Stan lumbered over from the garage floor. “Yeah? What ya need?”
“Look,” Bernie said, putting a hand on Stan’s shoulder, “how about a little sales bet? Ten bucks says that in the next three days combined we sell less fan belts than just yesterday.” With his other hand he continued to flip the spark plug.
Stan looked astonished at first, but then frowned. “You’re suckering me again. What, did Ronnie tell you something about fan belts? I’m not stupid, Bernie.”
Bernie exuded nonchalance, kept flipping the plug. “Hey, if you don’t want to play—”
Stan grabbed the spark plug at Bernie’s next flip. “Okay, pal, I’ll play your game. But my rules this time. Not fan belts. Spark plugs.”
Bernie did a flawless imitation of someone turning pale. “But, Stan—”
“No buts! Take the bet or I tell everybody you’re a swindler.” Bernie nodded weakly, and Stan left laughing.
Bernie leaned in the office and gave Ronald a wink. “Break down and join us at McCollough’s, Ronnie. First drink’s on me.”
Ronald smiled. “No promises at all, Bernie. Tonight’s a definite home night for me.”
The number of butterflies in Beijing increased 3.24 percent. In Albany, eighty-seven telephone poles toppled.
* * * *
“How was school?” He met her at the door. It was quarter to four in the afternoon.
She looked at him as she set a stack of papers on the kitchen table. “It was fine,” she said, her voice wary.
“Anything fun happen?” He felt the confidence and spoke easily.
Jessica leaned with one hand on the kitchen table, the other hand in the pocket of her blue cardigan. “A few things, yes.”
He walked from the sink and stood beside her, drying the dishwater from his hands with a towel. “So tell me some of them. I haven’t heard a funny school story out of you in two months.”
She took off her sweater and sat down slowly, never taking her eyes off him. “All right,” she said, “I’ll tell you one.”
“Great,” he said. “Do you want a cup of coffee?”
She didn’t go out that evening.
After dinner she excused herself to the bedroom, and he heard the phone being dialed and her whispers. He smiled. The living room stereo was tuned to an easy-listening station. He turned the lights low and waited for her to come downstairs.
The next day there was still only Bernie’s case of spark plugs at Luke’s garage. He made dinner for her that night, a London broil, one of three dishes he knew how to prepare. They laughed when the cooking meat set off the smoke alarm. She stayed home.
“You really don’t mind I’m a blue-collar worker?” he asked.
She unbuttoned his shirt and removed it from his shoulders. The collar, of course, came off with it.
The evening after, they went out for ice cream after supper and walked through Setterman’s Park until sunset.
On the third day, the next shipment of spark plugs arrived.
* * * *
He dashed from behind the dumpster to the brick retaining wall and fell, face forward, from the weight of the case of spark plugs. For a second all he could see were elusive, peripheral stars and the capital C of the Champion logo.
Last one, he thought. His breath came in barely audible squeaks. Last one.
He made the run to his car, popped the trunk, and heaved the case in. Twelve boxes, total.
“If you need spark plugs,” Luke’s voice said from behind him, “I’ll just give you a goddamn set.”
The little breathing squeaks all pulled together into a strained squawk of surprise, and every bit of energy and tension drained from Ronald’s limbs. He felt like a puddle.
Luke strolled out from the far side of the retaining wall. He was there, Ronald thought. He was right there watching.
“They were bad!” Ronald yelled, and he realized he sounded just as guilty as he was. “They were just like the last shipment. I was going to drive them back myself and get some good ones because I knew how upset you were the last time”—while he was saying this, Luke had opened one of the boxes and removed a ring case of six perfectly healthy spark plugs—”and even though some of them look good they’re all defective and won’t make any sparks, so what good are they as spark plugs?”
Luke stared at him.
Ronald realized what he needed more than anything else in the world at this moment was some of Bernie’s fast talk and charm.
“I’ll buy them!” He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and began digging out credit cards. “See? MasterCard, Luke, and it has a $2000 limit with just $58.69 on it. I wasn’t stealing them. We can ring up the sale right now. You can call the number and check. It only has $58.69 on it.”
Luke pulled a case from the car trunk. “Don’t wanna even talk about it,” he said, then walked back toward the garage.
Ronald sank down against the car, crouched on his heels with his back against the bumper. He buried his face in the sleeve of the arm set across his knees. With the other arm he still held out the MasterCard.
* * * *
When he arrived home at 6:26, Ronald wasn’t at all surprised not to find Jessica waiting, not to find any note saying where she had gone. He poured himself a scotch and water and sat on the living room sofa, his feet up on the coffee table.
Due to overtime work at NASA, the consumption of wrapped sandwiches rose 14 percent. Three junks sank off Taiwan.
After a second scotch and water, Ronald said, aloud, “It’s not my fault. How the hell am I supposed to keep a service station from selling spark plugs?”
After a third glass, he shouted, “It is my fault! It’s all my fault! I shouldn’t have lost the position with Resotech. I couldn’t have lost it!”
He went for a fourth drink, but the scotch bottle was nearly empty. He poured what little was left and held the glass up to the cove light over the kitchen sink. “That’s about one-eighth,” he said. “Yeah, definitely one-eighth.” He finished it with a swallow and grabbed his car keys.
Bernie’d won seventeen bets with Ronald’s help. Little twerp owed him seventeen beers. Eight ounces a glass, one hundred and thirty-six ounces. One point eight repeating six-packs. One point zero six two five gallons of beer.
He started the car. Two point four miles to McCollough’s Pub.
He parked on the street outside the bar; the parking lot was filled from the Friday-night crowds. The bouncer stared at him when he walked in, so Ronald tried to stand straight and walk evenly. He had to elbow his way through the crowd. My God, he thought, there must be a hundred and eighteen people in here. Rock music blared over the sound system, and Ronald had to pause and close his eyes every few steps through the crowd. His head throbbed. He looked around, trying to spot Bernie, and finally ran into Stan at the bar. The mechanic was staring into his beer mug, apparently fascinated by watching the bubbles in the beer head popping their way down to the liquid.
“Hey, Stan,” he said, poking the man’s shoulder. “Where’s Bernie? He owes me some beers.”
Stan glanced over, looking a bit dazed from the break in concentration. “Oh, hi, Ronnie.” Then he turned his entire body toward Ronald. “Ronnie? Ronnie!” Stan threw his arms around Ronald in a bear hug, and Ronald felt his breath pressed out of his lungs. Stan was laughing wildly.
“I win! I finally won! That little twerp bastard finally loses one. Ronnie, it’s nice as hell to see you!”
Ronald struggled for a breath and tried to keep his balance, a combination he realized the scotch was making difficult. “It’s, uh, nice to see you too, Stan.”
Stan put a hand to his head and kept laughing, although he suddenly seemed embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Ronnie. It’s just Bernie bet me thirty bucks that he could invite you to McCollough’s twenty times in a row and you’d never show. He’s only asked you seventeen times, and here you fucking are.”
Stan hugged him again, and Ronald felt nauseous from the thick air, the noise, and the press of the crowd. “C’mon,” Stan said, “they got a table near the back. I’m gonna show you off and win my prize. I can’t wait to see the twerp’s face.”
Bernie’s face, Ronald saw, did not let Stan down. When he and Stan reached the back table, Stan tapped Bernie on the shoulder, and when Bernie turned he dropped his beer mug halfway through the motion of sipping from it. But his face was nothing like Jessica’s, whose hand Bernie was holding across the table. Her eyes went wide and empty.
Ronald wasn’t sure what his own face was showing, but it must have been something impressive. Stan took him by the arm and said, “Hey, what the hell’s wrong with you, Ronnie?”
“My wife.”
Stan looked at Jessica, then at Bernie, his face slowly changing. “Oh, shit,” he said. “Bernie, you’re fucking scum. Oh, shit, Ronnie.”
Bernie was suddenly very busy. To Ronald, he sputtered, “No lie, she’s your wife? I just met her tonight. Just met her.” To Stan he said, “Hey, I owe you money, don’t I? We can go to the bar and have them cash a fifty.” He finally seemed to realize he was still holding Jessica’s hand, and pulled back as if he had touched a hot plate. Quieter, but not so quiet that Ronald couldn’t hear him, he said, “Jessica, there’s no way he could have shown up here. There’s no way.”
Stan lifted Bernie from the chair by his shirt collar. His blue shirt collar. “I’m sorry Ronnie, I didn’t know. The twerp hit on her weeks ago when she wandered in alone. He’s been meeting her here ever since. I didn’t know she was your wife.” He dragged Bernie off in the direction of the bar.
Too much at once, Ronald thought. Too many variables. Then he felt the anger swelling in him, and he wasn’t sure where it should go or who deserved it most.
Jessica had lowered her head. “I needed to see him one last time, Ronald.” She was stirring her mixed drink with a swizzle stick, slow circles, the ice clanking against the glass. “I don’t know why I came. I guess I was breaking it off.”
All of the anger finally came to a head as Ronald watched the swizzle stick stirring even, gentle circles in her glass. He inhaled slowly. “You… goddammit, you’re out of control.”
He saw her shake, and the swizzle stick fell from her fingers. She looked up, her mouth open again. He had hurt her; it felt good, very good.
“Bernie?” Ronald said. “Bernie? A mechanic? You cheat on me with a blue-collar worker?”
“Jesus, Ronald, your obsession with collars and status. With numbers. With variables.” She wasn’t looking at him now. “Bernie gave me attention. That’s the only way he’s different from you.”
“I thought I understood you,” he said, and now he saw her tears starting. He walked away, out of the bar.
* * * *
He’d done everything he possibly could. Everything. What else could be done? Nothing. He drove, still blurry from the scotch, into the unlit parking lot of Luke’s service station. He put the car in park, took the keys out of the ignition, each action dragging like a tread through dead water. “I’ve done everything!” he shouted when he climbed from the car.
He tried the door first before he kicked it in. Inside was solid blackness, but the layout was simple geometric shapes in his memory. He had no idea where a hammer would be, but found an exhaust pipe in the muffler inventory.
He felt his way along the wall to where the spark plugs were stored and began beating the exhaust pipe against the cases. “I’ve done everything!” he shouted as the pipe tore the boxes apart. “Everything!” Two of the cases ripped open. Spark plug ring holders scattered on the next hit, and he continued to beat them into the floor, sparks from metal striking metal shooting out with each swing.
Ten cases. Eleven. Twelve.
The garage filled with the swirling red and white of police rollers outside the front window, and the lights came on. “Put down the pipe!” a voice shouted, but Ronald kept swinging until two sets of arms grabbed him and pinned him to the floor. He kicked and tried to twist out of their hold; there was a third grip, and he felt the clamp of metal on his wrists.
“This guy’s out of his head!” one of the voices said. “Jesus, get him under control!”
* * * *
A question burned away the haze of his hangover. Had he gotten all the plugs? It seemed he had been able to wreck most of them. Yes, all of them, in fact.
It took time for Ronald to manage the six feet from the cell bunk to the bars. “Hey,” he called to the officer at the desk across from the lockup. “Hey!”
The officer put down the newspaper he was reading and rose from his desk. He walked slowly over to the bars, carrying a sandwich and coffee. “Yeah?” he asked, taking a bite from the sandwich. Ronald’s stomach was queasy.
“Do I get a phone call?”
The officer shrugged. “You should dry out first, buddy.”
“Please,” Ronald said. He pressed his face against the bars. “I’ve got to call home. What time is it?”
The officer unlatched the barred door. “It’s almost four in the morning,” he said. “You better have a real understanding family. Don’t get your hopes up about being bailed. I’m supposed to keep you until the evaluation.”
“Evaluation?”
“Yeah, you know.” The officer traced circles around his temple with one finger and whistled coo-coo sounds. “The boys from the mind-farm gotta find out if you’re safe to let out on the streets.” He led Ronald by the elbow over to a pay phone bolted to the gray concrete wall of the station office. He tossed Ronald a quarter.
Ronald dialed the house. On the seventh ring, he glanced behind him at the officer. “She’s asleep,” Ronald said. “It will take her a while to get to the phone.” The officer stared like stone over the top of his newspaper.
On the thirteenth ring, Ronald glanced back again and tried to laugh. “It’s sixty-two feet from the sofa to the upstairs phone. If she’s asleep on the sofa she’ll need to walk all the way up there.”
Nineteen rings. “She isn’t there, fella.”
“She has to be!” Ronald said. He took hold of the receiver with both hands and leaned the back of his head against the wall. “I got them all,” he said, “I ruined every last case. Luke could never sell them now. They were the variable. Everything is under control.” The officer rolled his eyes and repeated his coo-coo whistle.
Twenty rings. Twenty-seven. Thirty-three.
The officer came over and took the receiver from his hands. He let Ronald stay there, back to the wall, and returned to his newspaper.
Not a stable variable, Ronald thought. She should have been home. Not a constant, because he had destroyed the plugs. That meant the influence had changed, had somehow moved on. A random variable? One that could alter its cause but retain its effect? Even if that were true, he could find it, the way he had found the spark plugs. He would find it—
The rustle of the newspaper caught Ronald’s attention. The police officer’s thumb gripped the page just below a 45-cent coupon for Maxwell House coffee.
For S. L. Spotts