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part 2 of the story
All These Amusements

Matt McGee

    “G’night, Banana.”
    “Goodnight.” Billy handed the phone to Sonny, who added a ‘goodnight Debbie’ and hung up with a rattling clack.
    “How’re you two doin?”
    “I’m lagging.”
    “Hmm. Imagine that.”
    “What’s that mean?”
    Sonny yawned. “I don’t know. Just remember what Carrie Ford used to say about you.”
    Carrie Ford. Good Lord, Billy thought, I haven’t heard that name in years much less thought about anything she said. He stared at the ceiling, consumed by memories of his second grade crush and the irony of her name resurfacing in the little room.
    “What did Carrie used to say about me?” he finally asked.
    But Sonny was breathing too heavy to answer.

* * *

    Billy lay awake all but a few minutes, thinking about Carrie and trying to decipher Sonny’s meaning when he forced his head to clear before mild yellow morning hit the Boulevard, punching the clock where neon had worked all night. When he woke Sonny was gone. Billy wondered if he’d timed it.
    Billy lay flat on the floor, his mind filled with Carrie Ford’s six year silence, a great courtship cut short when Carrie realized Billy wasn’t going to follow her to Pennsylvania and get married. He remembers the actual call; she was trying to play coy, he was trying to tune a Les Paul that a washed-out band mate had sold him dirt cheap. Carrie became a nun, not because of him anyway, and lives in a small Upstate home surrounded by clergy. Despite the few moments of sleep and the confusion of having awoke with his nose buried in hotel carpet, Billy picked up the phone.
    At 6 a.m. Pacific time Billy dialed Carrie’s mother, who provided her daughter’s new contact with all the sweetness a Pennsylvania farmwife does for an old friend. He dialed. Carrie knew the voice.
    “How are you.”
    “OK.” Billy sat upright, his back against the bed. His face had left an impression in the carpet. He erased it with a swirl of his foot.
    “I’m gonna come see you.”
    “When?”
    “Tomorrow.”
     “Ookay. Where are you?”
    “Hotel. I’ll fly a red eye into Newark, land around eight, drive out and pick you up for lunch. So... clear your schedule of all those bishops and arch-cardinals.”
    “Oo-kay. Is everything alright?”
    “Sure.”
    Carrie waited. “Oo-kay.”
    Billy said ‘ok’ toward the carpet. “See you manana.”
    “What?”
    How quickly one forgets they’re talking to the east coast. “Tomorrow.”
    “Tomorrow. Wait! You need my address.”
    “Your mom gave it to me.”
    “Oh. Yeah, of course.”
    “Bye.”
    “Bye, Bill.”
    Billy dropped the phone into the cradle. He stepped out to the sidewalk and threw a hailing hand toward the flow of metered cabs. He opened a blue door and, as he leaned his first leg in, Billy caught the stamp in the patch of concrete beneath his foot: WILLIAM & SONS 1927. For these first miles of pilgrimage, he’d endure the driver’s incessant rambling as the price of having abandoned his car. He’d tip this last Angelino then flee, telling himself that answers lie elsewhere.
    Billy packed an overnight bag and made an online reservation with American Airlines. He called a shuttle; it arrived in 20 minutes. He breezed through security and boarded a flight before distraction could find him.
    His feet pounded thru Gate 77. It was there, as he stomped down the jetway that exhaustion caught him.
    He weaved down the jet’s center aisle, falling foot to foot, bumping the arms of chairs, some occupied, one by a currently famous rock guitarist. Billy flopped back in his seat, sleepdrunk. His head echoed with Carrie’s voice. Warm adrenaline, his final fuel, pulsed through his arms and legs.
    He tipped the stewardess for extra Cokes and coffee and watched five hours of passing clouds, miniature landscape, and one bad Keanu Reeves film until, finally, he sensed a gentle sinking and heard his waitress in the sky request that everyone sit up straight. Billy set aside the flight blanket. The crash fields and tractor trailer yards of New Jersey floated by the window, coated in drifts of white powder. He walked through the terminal to Avis and rented a car twenty years newer than his.
    The Pennsylvania countryside starts right after the bridge out of Newark. To Billy’s Southern California eye, where four-home tracts spring up in lots unsuitable for even a decent ball field, the eastern landscape is impossible to comprehend. How could all this empty space just be lying around? Why isn’t someone throwing together a Wal-Mart and making bowling pins out of the trees? His foot itched to press into the accelerator, but rows of slow, slush-crusted trucks and the memory of black ice restrained him.
    It was about one in the afternoon when the wheels of his rented Nissan crunched new tracks in the snow affront Carrie’s home. She sat in the front window, reading. When his car drifted into sight she stood, disappeared a moment, then slung the screen door open and squinted at the glare.
    “Billy.”
    He shut his car door. “Hi Carrie.”
    Her embrace circled him like a net. What had been a mild dizziness faded into gray; Billy’s knees buckled and he thumped against a neighbor’s Buick. Carrie looked to the neighbor’s windows and threw her arm over her friend’s shoulder. Billy brushed off the fender; like all the others on the street, the car was unlocked.
    “Quite a way you’ve got of greeting a lady.” She led him to a wingback chair, let go of his arm and let him fall.
    “Sorry.”
    “No sweat.” Carrie puffed as if just having guided a couch into position. “Not used to carrying men into my house anymore.”
    “Been a while?”
    Carrie settled into the chair opposite Billy. A wood crucifix hung over the doorway beside her. “Quite a while. I think the last one was... a guy who’d had too much to drink and showed up in Sister Katherine’s Bible study on Easter morning, wearing a bathrobe and fake beard shouting, ‘I am your savior! I have risen!’”
    “Do you know how boring those classes are? You remember. I was trying to be like... it was like Show & Tell.”
    “Never saw my bathrobe again.”
    “You didn’t want to. Remember the Shroud of Turin?”
    “Enough.” Carrie asked polite questions. Seeing his exhaustion she insisted on making lunch. Billy didn’t argue but sat at her kitchenette and watched her assemble tuna sandwiches like the precious samples they’d once carried in lunchboxes. He smiled at the Sunbeam bread and Wise potato chips she doesn’t know she has. She delivered a plate of triangle-cut sandwiches and sat across from him.
    “Carrie Carrie, light as a fairy,” he echoed from the schoolyard. “What a turbulent ride.”
    She crossed one arm over her chest, and with her back straight lifted a triangle of sandwich. She chewed, sipped from a milk glass and took another bite. “I assume you’re not talking about the flight. So what brings you to snowy Pennsylvania in the middle of the week?”
    A moment’s electric composure returned to Billy’s spine.
    “Nice place, Carrie. Thank you for lunch.”
    “A pastor in our parish once enlisted my help in writing a sermon. ‘There are two kinds in the world,’” she quoted, “‘those who spend a lifetime setting tables, and those who go through life preparing to dine.’”
    “And they say women can’t be priests.”
    She sipped her milk. “Only the men say that.”
    “Do you remember,” Billy finally got out, “the last thing you said to me about ten years ago?”
    She dabbed her mouth with a paper napkin. “I said a lot of things.”
    “You said... you said I could never come back here and live. I said ‘I could, I could, I swear.’ And do you remember what you told me?”
    “No. But I know you could never come back here.”
    “Why?” He knew she was onto it and swore to hold himself upright just long enough to hear it again.
    “You couldn’t come back here. You’re too busy -”
    “- in my head,” he recited. “I’d be bored shitless, because -”
    “Everything you want to do is out there -”
    “And back here -”
    “There’s nothing.”
    Billy slouched and exhaled what was left in his lungs. “Exactly.”
    Exactly. Word for word, like a Psalm no matter what hotel you open the drawer in. He was free to go. Might as well stay and finish the sandwiches.
    “I thought you were wrong. I thought I could do it. But as years played out and I got more interested in things, everything, I realized in L.A. everything is at my disposal. And when I woke up yesterday I thought - how did she know that? You’ve never been more than a few hundred miles from here for, what? More than a week? How did you know that?”
    “Read a lot of Jean Genet.” She set a crust of bread on her plate, sipped her Crowley’s and looked right at him. “Is this what brought you all this way? To replay a conversation we had ten years ago?”
    “It was a terribly important conversation. I didn’t know it. I wasn’t so involved back then.” A shiver of exhaustion shook him. He thought of curling up beside Marci in those hours before sunrise, but a moment later the image was gone. “Now I don’t know how to stop.”
    “Stop what.”
    “Stop.”
    “Stop what.”
    “Stop doing.” Billy stared out the porch screen. Blackbirds pecked at a bare spot of ground between snow drifts. “I swallow everything that comes my way.”
    “You’re saying you’re addicted to movement?”
    “If there is such a thing. Carrie I’m so tired. I’m not afraid life is going to pass me by anymore. I’m afraid I’ve passed it. And when I finally do stop, I’ll look around and everything will be over.”
    “But oh, the stories you’ll tell.”
    “It’s not funny.” He looked at his lap. “I’ve seen a lot. But I’ve passed a lot by, too. Now there’s something... someone... I may not get again. And I can’t slow down enough to feel it happening.”
     She examined her old schoolmate with all the empathy that a Pennsylvania farm life had given her. She laid a hand over his.
    “Do you need to stay?”
    Billy nodded.
    “You don’t need to know, but any idea how long?”
    Billy shook his head softly. “I need to get straightened up. Out there, temptation waits everywhere.”
    “Well,” she patted his hand and sat up again. “We’ve got cable here too.”
     “I’m OK with that so long as I don’t have a remote! If I have to keep getting up to change the channel I might just get up, go across the room and keep going out the front door.”
    “Well, don’t go far.” Carrie turned toward the hallway. “Again I’m no expert, but seems to me sometimes the only way to run away and find yourself is to stand still.” She turned and disappeared into the yellow-glow of the single bulb lighting the hallway. Billy stayed in the kitchen and nibbled. Her words echoed in his head, and as he heard them repeat, he realized her next cannon blast of wisdom had just been shot over his know-it-all bow.
    Carrie made up a spare bed in a room so generous that it instantly swallowed Billy’s California memorabilia and any importance it may have held. Billy hadn’t been in bed before two a.m. in years, but tonight he was under the sheets at nine-thirty. Carrie returned, a book in hand, and pulled up a straight chair beside the bed. She laid the volume beside the bed, made no mention nor direction toward its presence, then looked at Billy. She reached out and picked up his hand.
    “Comfortable?”
    “Perfect.”
    “Good.”
    Billy examined her face, softening with the weight of east coast winters. “Thanks Carrie.”
    Light Pennsylvania snow floated outside the green pane. We don’t have old windows like these out west, Billy thought. The Earth moves them all back into sand.
    Her voice was now the same firm whisper of the nuns they’d run from in parochial school. She watched the flakes, too. “I thought about what you said. What I said, apparently. And it’s true. This isn’t, can probably never be your home. But there is one. Think about it. Somewhere there’s a place, maybe a person you always think of when you think of home.”
    Billy slipped his hand beneath the covers and weaved his fingers through the small rosary he’d swiped from the dresser. He stared into the ceiling. “Is the establishment going to object to a man being under your roof?”
    “No one’s going to ask. But if they do, I’ll tell them you’re from California. They’ll understand. ‘Oh, him? He’s just having a little stay at the Carrie Ford clinic.”
    “Treating addiction.”
    “Right.”
    “And the twelve step plan?”
    She smiled at the floor beside the bed. “I’ll leave that to you. There’s an awful big hole in there you’re trying to fill with all these amusements.”
    “A black hole.”
    She leaned back in her chair, her posture an imitation of nuns past. “Of course I’m no expert in this department but you need a girl. Help you get right.”
    Billy smiled.
    “Someone in mind?”
    “Yeah. I need to come to her clean though. No urge to run away.”
    Carrie bit her bottom lip. “Do you believe in out of body experiences?”
    Billy kept looking at the ceiling. “You mean the thing where you die and go through the tunnel with all the light, see the face of God, visit old relatives...?”
    “Yes.”
    Billy had a theory: the brain has one last burst of electrical energy and, in that white flash, a flood of visions comes as the body expires. “Sure,” he answered.
    “They say before you go, wherever you go, you see all of them.”
    “All of who?”
    Carrie sat still. “Everyone that was important. Everyone you passed on your way to... wherever you needed to go.”
    “OK.”
    “And you feel no remorse in their conclusion. Or yours.”
    Billy thought aloud. “What if the thing I’m heading into isn’t actually a conclusion, but another stop on the merry-go round?”
    “Stop being smart. But, I suppose that’s where faith comes in.” She looked at Billy, lying still, staring upward. His eyelids fluttered. His lips quietly separated. Carrie put her hands on her lap and pushed herself up. She returned the chair against the wall, crossed the room and took the brass knob in her light grip.
    “Goodnight, sweet prince.”
    She reached beneath the shade of the small white table lamp, squatted atop the dresser and clicked it off. A few inches of yellow light slipped through the doorjamb from the hallway, casting a slice across Billy. A bedroom door sounded down the hall, then silence fell. The door stirred Billy’s brain one last time and he recalled Carrie’s ten year-old words, coupled by her latest suggestion. His eyes fell closed, and sound slowly ceased to exist until there was only snow.

* * *

    During their official engagement, for which they bought a real ring, Billy & Debbie discovered they’d spent their single years banking money rather than pouring it into toys or across wet Friday night bar tops. Their joined accounts formed a comfortable down payment on a four-bedroom home on Prentiss Street, two blocks from their former high school. On damp September nights, the white haze of football stadium light fills the sky above the rooftops, accompanied by faint cheers and the thin pierce of a referee’s whistle. For the first few weeks they ordered a lot of pizza until Debbie’s mother visited from Minnesota and whipped the kitchen into shape.
    “Like the chicken?”
    “Good work, Banana. My mom used to make it like this.”
    Debbie reached for the bread basket. “You’ve never told me much about her.”
    “You want I should tell you now?”
    Debbie buttered a roll and nodded. Billy looked at her favorite centerpiece, a wire & straw basket holding hardboiled eggs. “Well, aside from the fact that she died before I really got to know her, she cooked a lot. I’d get up to go to school, there was breakfast. I’d come home from school, she’d have a snack ready before I went out to play. I’d come in when it got dark and there was dinner. I’d go to bed, get up the next day, there she was, breakfast all over again.”
    “She must’ve been a great cook.”
    “I didn’t really appreciate it until I moved out and starved a while. It wasn’t just the cooking - I didn’t know food cost so much”
    “Ah, misspent youth.”
    “You don’t know the half of it.”
    “Oh?”
    “Two years ago I was living that existence in the hills, surviving on Jumbo Jacks and eggs from the gas station. Ninety-nine cents a dozen every Sunday. I was poor. And I was idle. Bad combination.”
    Billy chewed another forkful of chicken. “Then I moved out of the hills and got a job. One job wasn’t enough so I got another, then another. Used to be I couldn’t hold a job for six months, now all of a sudden I’m collecting them. Plus I did guitar tech for a band and anything else I could get involved with. Got the miles on my car to prove it. I was like a chicken with its head cut off, mind pfft gone. After a while my body wasn’t able to stop.”
    “Why?”
    “Part of it was guilt, I guess. Like I was trying to catch up to something I thought I’d missed.”
    Debbie leaned over and dabbed the corner of her fiancé’s mouth with her napkin. “Feeling better?”
    He patted his belly. His plate was clean. He reached out and emptied the ice tea glass.
    “Almost.”
    “What more do you need.”
    Billy looked at her with a mischievous smile. She smiled into her lap.
    Billy pushed away from the table. He moved toward the hallway and the bedroom. “I’m goin’ out,” he called.
    Debbie looked around. She wasn’t near done and there were rolls, rice and dessert waiting.
    Billy changed into shorts, t-shirt and running shoes. He passed the doorsteps that once led to the homes of childhood friends, now repainted, re-sided, remodeled by another generation. A man alone with his memories is a man truly alone.
    The stadium lights have been left blaring above the empty football field. Billy stepped to the starting grid of the track and began a slow jog, pumping his toes into the gritty clay, knees rising, fists swinging.
    The sensation of running always fascinated him, his body propelling itself to full speed on stored fuel. His mind wanders to the memory of poverty in the hills and he runs a little faster, lapping the home team grandstands. Memories of he & Debbie’s first meeting creep back and finally, like a plane he coasts onto the grassy infield and collapses. His lungs eventually slow their heaving and, suddenly, a timer pops the lights off. Billy lay in cool, welcome darkness. He leaned his head to one side, seeing the neighborhood. He climbed to his feet and staggered home, clouded by runner’s high.
    Debbie was still at the dinner table. She didn’t ask where he’d been, just watched him shuffle toward the shower. After twenty minutes beneath the hot spray, all he wanted, finally, was to rest. He walked naked, towel in hand to the bedroom, and wiped his eyes dry. Debbie waited beneath the sheets. He returned the smile he’d known all these years, draped the towel over the amplifier, got in bed and slid his waist beside hers.
    He brushed away her bangs and slid his body on top of hers. When he reached for the nightstand condom drawer, like that day over brunch and the prayer that brought him home, she intercepted him. She gently replaced his hand where it belonged and pressed her ankles into his backside. The corner of his right eye burned and a slow drop cut a trail in his cheek to her collar. It was the best home a schoolboy could know. Soon, it would be another’s.

They said ‘timing is everything’
made him want to be everywhere
there’s a lot to be said for nowhere.

- Eddie Vedder

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