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A short story

by Jack Mauro

Two things, before this tale can be told with any degree of verisimilitude, must be made clear: Everything that summer did not necessarily spring from the unaccountable edit on the Chapman Highway billboard. But a legitimate start, on yellow brick roads and elsewhere, is nice. Also: that what did happen happened three years past the millennium—which, you may recall, was fully expected to blow up the planet—is worth noting as a lesson to us all. To wit; do you imagine, silly and vain world, that the universe pencils in its changes on the same calendar you employ?

Best Carmichael, banker, is motoring to work in the thick dawn of the seventh day of July. So thick, this dawn, that it does not so much break as rend, like celestial licorice. He makes his way up Chapman Highway, mindful of his rate of speed and ever obedient to every sign regarding vehicular activity. He is a model citizen, an exemplary template for the thousands on the road who choose to emulate anything but him.

Already the air conditioning in his Oldsmobile signals by a dwindling of effort its surrender in the face of the new day. Perspiration jewels the upper lip of Best, and sweat can be felt on what bankers have for thighs, below his light wool trousers. He flicks on his car's radio and hears Britney Spears pleading with a former beau to unbreak her heart, as the tune's original songstress once importuned, sans tech beat. Best does not actually listen to this. But Britney Spears is conjured in his mind, more perspiration is generated, and that is enough.

He nears the city proper; he halts at a red light close to the bridge spanning the torpid and fat serpent we call the Tennessee River. In the seconds before the light changes, he looks at but only dimly records the billboard he has thusly passed every morning for the last five years. Then the light drops to green. Yet Best stays put a moment longer. He squints at the billboard. On the soft blue background are still the variously typefaced letters spelling "Knoxville," cleverly spaced and colored to add bounce! to the name and suggest bounce! to the transient. Then there is still the ellipsis, the syntactical come-on of three successive dots, trailed by the more sedately printed "naturally."

Yet someone has changed the "naturally" to "unnaturally." Someone has done this, moreover, so deftly that no vandalism is evident. At all. The three dots remain enticingly there, the blue of the background is untouched throughout, and the additional two letters are painted with the same stroke, in the same size and in the same white as the bulk of the word they now prefix. Someone, thinks Best, is very good.

An hour later.

One and Two softly creep, creep up the carpeted stairs to Club LeConte. They are up to no good, these young men, in the most literal way. The bad they intend is pitifully mild, unworthy of the most marginally delinquent adolescent.

Two whispers hoarsely, "What if we get caught?"

One responds with the bravado of the intensely stupid and advises his companion to utter no further inquiry. They ascend, and walk into the lounge with the preposterous and clumsy stride of those wishing to appear inconspicuous.

No one is in the lounge save Dip Dip, the breakfast server. She is at the window, dully staring at the mass of hot and heavy air beyond it and holding a cinnamon roll between her fingers like a cigarette. (Dip Dip was not, incidentally, christened as such. Nor is the name an Oriental soubriquet. It is simply that the club's computer, clearly unhappy with no nickname for her added in the space provided for one, supplied the repetitive scoop. Would that all the machines to which we surrender our lives practiced such whimsy.)

Dip Dip turns a smiling face to the trespassers. Two stops dead. One, beautifully and sociopathically free of moral fetters, rises to the occasion and says, "Hello, there."

"Did y'all want some breakfast?"

They will go to jail, thinks Two. While One immediately takes in and considers this unforeseen opportunity. After all, he reasons, the girl asked. It's not their fault she assumes they are members of the club. But, no. It would not be enjoyable, with Two guilty and unable to digest.

"Thanks, no. Mind if I show my friend around? He's never been up here." Two is determinedly heterosexual, but at this moment his comrade's carefree deception sparks something like love within him.

By way of response, Dip Dip shrugs. She waves the cinnamon roll in her hand to indicate that, as far as she is concerned, they may run rampant through the hallways with streamers. Two draws his first easy breath in the past hour; One makes a mental note to try for more and bigger things to which he is not entitled. The pair cross the dance floor and walk to the windows of the Tennessee Room. This is the object of their criminality, that One may point out to Two the new planetarium as seen from Knoxville"s architectural apex. This is the rather stunted occasion to which One rose, a moment before.

So, they look. They look upon the planetarium much as tourists stare at anything supposedly of great interest; i.e., oddly disappointed that it does not explode, or talk, or something. They do not even glance to the west, where the Sunsphere is beginning to catch and reflect what beams make it through the weighty morning air. Does anyone witness that? Yes. Unseen by our petty miscreants, Lucius T. watches the tarnished globe from an impromptu hammock of chairs in the far corner. And Lucius T. thinks, removes the cartoonish chef"s hat from atop his head, scratches his graying scalp, and thinks some more.

Two suddenly grasps the charms of the planetarium. He says: "You know what it looks like? It looks like a Christmas ornament, like from Hallmark, in its plastic container."

One considers his friend's clumsily poetic observation, and says, "Fag."

Another hour hence. We are done with One, done with Two. Lucius will be lost in thought for a while longer, and is content to wait for us. Other personages of import are now stirring.

A #22 KAT bus makes its way down Broadway like a Flying Dutchman with a fondness for Vol football plastered on its hull. There are no passengers. This is not, however, unusual for the time, nor for the direction. At the Summer and Walnut Streets nexus, sleepy people in fast food colors are already waiting to board, ride, dismount and deep fry. Nathan, skipper of this vessel, will smile to give them heart before they must confront the day's perils of hot grills, hotter oil, and things not quite chicken.

But a young man is standing by the stop just south of the Northgate Plaza. His costly Eminem Brand Streetwear, designed to look distressed, is beaten down beyond the manufacturer's intent to a state of trauma. The blonde spikes of hair above his black roots can barely stand upright and have all but despaired of new moussing. He yawns and raises a hand in a gesture high and haughty, the forefinger of it seeming to call, not for a bus, but for a fresh bottle of champagne. The bus stops, the boy deigns to board. He smiles in such a way that Nathan has in his mind the sudden image of an iguana.

"Daddy," says the boy/iguana, "took my wheels."

This cryptic salutation delivered, Brice "Junior" Lawhorn, Jr.—for that is the boy's name—moves to a seat. For five blocks he attempts to engage Nathan in conversation; for five blocks Nathan grunts twice and keeps an uneasy eye on his sole, reptilian passenger.

Then #22 pulls to the curb for Darya Bascombe, as it does every morning. Miss Bascombe is the Fury of room service at the downtown Holiday Inn, a lesser and Black goddess gifted with fine character, extraordinary cheekbones and a singular approach to delivering the meals ordered by the hotel's guests. She presents the trays, not with a discreet knock followed by a soft inquiry that all is as ordered, but with a kick to the door and disbelief, if not outright disgust, for requests for ketchup where ketchup is clearly unnecessary. Darya in room service is a prison matron bringing state-mandated nourishment to felons. Her job is to feed them, and feed them she does. But demands for frou-frous such as condiments are, to her mind, pushing it.

Interestingly, Darya earns excellent tips. Always. Her job is as well exceedingly secure, as every single employee of superior rank in the hotel is terrified of her.

Yet she is well-liked by Nathan, and is to him a vision of reassuring normalcy this morning. Darya ascends the three steps of the bus with the measured tread of a duchess, and she and Nathan exchange their customary greetings. She moves to her usual seat, sees that it is occupied by Junior, registers disdain via flared nostrils, and sits behind him. The bus is hushed—ominously—within. In short order it leaves Broadway behind and penetrates the downtown area.

If an ominous silence were to be, say, a little less silent and give us some sort of clue, we might heed it. But would probably get it wrong, as we unfailingly scurry to see just what's making that odd noise in the basement.

Nathan steers #22 onto Locust Street, preparatory to swinging into Union and around to Walnut, where the morning's troops are dispiritedly waiting. At that very moment Mr. Earl Dunn is ending a pre-dawn stroll with a return to his hotel. He is forty-four years old, stout, and cursed with chronic sleeplessness. He is in Knoxville on business, though not his own. Nothing, he reflects, is ever or has ever been his own. He feels acutely in this hour that he will die in his highly successful brother's shadow. In this lugubrious state of mind he crosses Locust. Then the Sunsphere catches his eye and stays his progress. He is spellbound by a single golden panel just above the girdle of the thing. It is incandescently radiant. His cares vanish. He is at this moment a spiritually free man, for the only time in his life.

Nathan pilots his bulky craft down the incline of the street. A thought then flashes under the limp spikes of Junior, flawlessly self-oriented as all Junior's thoughts are. He calls out to Nathan: "Man, why you stop this thing so much?" This, Junior's sixth essay at evoking a response from the driver, succeeds. Nathan stares at the smarmy youth in his rear-view mirror and says, as to an especially dense child, "This is a bus." Darya is possessed of a sudden and palpable hatred for this creature in her usual seat. She smacks the back of his head with the back of her hand, then wipes the back of her hand on her pant leg. Nathan, now gleeful, resumes his attention to the road. But too late. #22 shatters the sunlit rapture of Earl Dunn by striking him and sending him flying in a southerly direction. For an instant it would seem that Mr. Dunn will at last surpass his brother, and soar. But this achievement, like those we more customarily esteem, is short-lived, and a force greater than his brother's shadow slaps him to earth. Dead. Dunn, this Dunn at least, done.

Lucius sees it all transpire from the windows of Club LeConte. It is to him a sign. He makes his decision. He goes to his locker, singing under his breath.

Next: In which the greater Dunn arrives to bury the lesser, and sees the future; Lucius tastes liberty and Knoxville tastes "Luscious;" and Miss Bascombe starts to burn.
 

June 28, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 26
© 2001 Metro Pulse