certain ways, by certain hands, it was damaged goods.
“Thing thing on the phone,” said Hattie. “Thing.”
“Yes,” said Charmagne, staring out the window at the passing palm trees.
I closed my eyes and tried to relax. Still, I couldn’t help asking myself how different the beating Hattie’s brain had taken was from the type Dick Doyle’s had endured. Hattie certainly couldn’t turn her shortcomings on and off. You could push Hattie onstage and shine a spotlight on her, but believe me, it wouldn’t start her square dancing.
“What a phony that Dick is,” I heard the old man from the dumpster say. “How do people fall for bullshit like that?” And I simply didn’t know. I could not understand what sort of black magic Dick Doyle used to make himself so appealing. He didn’t have brain damage. He wasn’t an inspiration. There was no triumph of the human spirit going on at a Dick Doyle show. With his mustache and his fancy fucking cowboy boots.
An image of Dick flashed through my mind. I saw him at home, getting ready for his show that night. He had the mask down; he was completely alert and clear-eyed, singing into the bathroom mirror as he snapped up his cowboy shirt. He fastened his string tie and put on his hat, crooning away in that irritating voice of his. I could see dabs of shaving cream clinging to the bottom of his mustache.
He noticed my reflection in the mirror. “Oh, hey, Maxie,” he said, which was what Pearl used to call me.
“Max? Hey,” Joan said. “Are you all right?”
I opened my eyes and found that we were parked in front of the church. A couple of the old people were filing out, being helped down by attendants. I felt my face and discovered I was sweating.
“You were grinding your teeth really loud,” Joan said. “What were you thinking about?”
“Nothing. I was thinking about how much fun it’s going to be to get you out of here and up to New York. You’re going to love it.” I smiled at her.
“Don’t think about that just yet, okay?” she said, and rubbed my thigh.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t feel that we need to be thinking about that right now. Let’s just enjoy it for a while, all right? Get to know each other. We have time.”
“But we don’t have time. I’m leaving soon. And I want you to come. Please come with me? Joan?”
Joan kissed me on the jaw. “You were clenching your teeth again,” she said.
Orlando had recently seen Dick perform at the county fair. Penny for your thoughts, I said to him the next day.
“It’s not my kind of music,” he said. He’d just purchased a set of commemorative coins featuring the birds of the Southern marsh. He was cleaning them one by one with a cloth dipped in a mixture of vinegar and ammonia. The smell made my eyes water.
“But what did you think of Dick?” I said.
“I thought he was fucked up, man,” Orlando said, blowing on a coin. “Before he started they had to wipe the drool from his face.”
“You know, I don’t believe people with trauma to the brain really act like that,” I said, watching Orlando rub the coin dry with a piece of velvet. “They can’t just snap out of it. They’re not so aware of everything.”
“I don’t like these thoughts, my friend,” Orlando said, and tossed the coin to me. On it was a picture of a woodpecker nesting in a tree. I slipped the coin into its case, which read: “An aggressive species, the pileated woodpecker is known to take over nests already inhabited by other, larger birds that it scares off by means of its hysterical laugh-like call.”
“You were doing so well, too, Miller,” said Orlando. “The last few weeks you didn’t even mention the singer or her, the woman.”
“Pearl.”
“Where is this coming from all of a sudden? From that old man?”
“Nowhere. I’m fine. All I’m saying is that if Dick is faking, people have a right to know. You paid what, ten dollars to see him play dumb?”
“Do you remember,” Orlando said, holding out the next coin, “how embarrassing it was for you the last time you acted on these thoughts, my friend? These same thoughts?”
I grabbed the coin from him. My first week in Florida had been very hard. The day I’d arrived I discovered that Pearl had moved in with Dick—that she was living with him in his family’s farmhouse outside of town. On top of this, I learned from Pearl’s sister, Pat, that she was likely seeing Dick, too—that she might actually be involved with him.
“She’s got a new man in her life, is how she put it,” said Pat. “Game over.”
Even so, I made a big effort to win Pearl back during those first few days. I tried calling the farmhouse where Dick and Pearl were living. I even drove out to the property. No one would talk to me, though. Which was ridiculous. The least I deserved was some sort of apology. Because what Pearl had done wasn’t fair. You don’t just leave someone like that. No discussion, not even a warning shot. It wasn’t right. But I was drinking a lot that week, too, so when the Doyle people called the police on me, I wasn’t able to properly explain myself.
“Right,” said Orlando, nodding. He stared me in the eye while he polished the next coin. “You remember. Your face in the gazette. Everyone making fun of you. Calling you a stalker. And so on.”
He handed me the coin, which showed a picture of a golden warbler. “Let me tell you something, my friend,” he said. “This man, Dick—he is not faking anything. You understand? He is a sick person. You are wrong in your thinking about this.”
“You’re entitled to your beliefs,” I said.
“Well, I don’t want violence near this store, understand? Not on my property. No way,” he said. “If I get into trouble with the police because of you, Miller, then you will have something to worry about.”
Orlando had lived in the States for only a couple of years and he retained a stark fear of run-ins with the police. He still had family in Argentina he hoped to bring over, a sister and her children. He’d told me about his situation one night a few weeks before when we’d gone drinking together and I’d confessed to having come to Florida to win back Pearl.
“My life,” he’d said, tapping his wallet, “right here.” Then he’d opened the wallet to let a chain of photos accordion out. He told me their names one by one: his sister, Lisette; her sons and daughters, William, Cee-Cee, Barbara, and Vaca. Each had his or her own photo and they were all posed in front of the same patchy dirt yard, so that when he dangled the pictures in one line, it gave the illusion that his relatives were dolls, figurines stacked one on top of the other, biggest to smallest, on a series of plain brown shelves.
“Orlando, I promise, I’m not going to do anything to Dick,” I said. “I was just talking about him. I’m over it.”
“Let me ask you one last thing, then, if you are so over it,” he said. “Why haven’t you gone to the fair down on Orange Blossom?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Oh, it has to do with everything, my friend. Before the fair opened, again and again you said you wanted to take Joan there. But now the fair is about to close and you still have not gone. Why is that, Miller?”
“Maybe I don’t feel like it. Maybe I’ve been busy here this week, with it being Dumpster Tuesday and everything.”
“Maybe you haven’t gone to the fair because this singer, this Dick is there, and you would not be able to control yourself when you saw him.”
“I’ll go this weekend. I’ll take Joan on Saturday.”
“No, see. I’m saying you should
“Orlando, look,” I said, but Orlando made a hissing sound that meant shut up because we had a customer.
