Wichita (9781609458904) Read online

  “I’m asking do you hear me?” Seth says, tapping the words out on Donald’s back.

  To prevent it all from blowing up into a brawl, Lewis grabs Seth by the biceps and drags him backwards but Seth hooks a foot around one of Lewis’s ankles and they reel across the kitchen floor and crash through the swinging doors on the pantry, boxes and broom handles clattering down as Seth elbows Lewis hard in the chest and scrambles back out.

  Donald is storming across the kitchen like a rampaging bear when Lewis emerges. He gives Seth a wide berth but forces Cody to jump aside to clear a path, going out through the door to the garage and flicking the door so that it slams shut then bounces back open, vibrating on its hinges.

  Seth looks around. “Yo, was he growling?” He slaps his knee, wheezes out a laugh. “He was fucking growling!”

  “Dude, I was almost roadkill!” Cody says. He opens the door after a moment and peers out into the garage, pulls the door closed, locks it.

  As if on second thought, Cody unlocks the door, opens it and trots out into the garage and on into the driveway, the low-slung jeans forcing him to scuttle like the man fleeing the exploded outhouse. Turning up toward the street, he disappears from view.

  “Bishop!” Seth says. “What the hell—”

  Bishop plucks a pair of eye masks from the bag and fiddles with the strap. “We can work this out,” he says.

  “Yeah?” Seth says, delightedly unconvinced.

  “We do have an agreement,” Bishop says with less assurance.

  Cody scuttles back inside and closes the door behind him. “Think he went to get a gun?” he asks Seth, who rolls his eyes.

  “There’s stuff he could use right there in the damn garage,” Cody tells Lewis. “There’s a ax and some gnarly prunin’ shears and big-ass framin’ hammer.”

  Seth says, “The man seems pretty upset by your very existence, dude.”

  “Word, Bishop!” Cody chimes in. “Your, like, whole right to exist is being questioned, son!”

  Bishop closes his eyes, composing himself. He sighs, giggles with embarrassment, looks at the floor, shakes his head. I’m sixty years old, Lewis hears him thinking. What am I doing? “God.”

  Lewis has been warily waiting for Seth to take some sort of shot, verbal or physical, for his interference in the disciplining of Donald. But with an air of having lost interest in the whole affair, Seth opens the refrigerator and fishes out a loaf of banana bread. He unwraps the cellophane, breaks off a hunk and tosses it to Cody, who catches it like a seal clapping and jams it into his mouth.

  “So hey, Seth,” Bishop says, tidying up his sack of eye masks. Bishop’s hands are shaking, Lewis notices. He would like to move on, pretend what’s just happened is already behind him but hasn’t recovered from it yet. “We need to get you into the clinic for your physical.”

  Seth sniffs the banana bread and stares in a hooded, unreadable way at Bishop, who smiles his mischievous eyebrow-waggling psychonaut smile, scrubs at his white beard excitedly with one hand. “I talked to Jesse about maybe leaving out the blocker for one session? Pure DMT for Seth!”

  The door to the garage flies open, banging against the wall and startling everyone, even Seth, who flinches.

  But it’s not raging-bull Donald, it’s Abby, struggling in with grocery bags in each hand, her face lighting up with pleasure at the sight of so many of “her boys” gathered in the kitchen. “Hello!” she greets them.

  “Gosh, you think this might be the one?” Seth says to Bishop, ignoring her. “The ultimate ride in the amusement park?”

  Bishop squints in bemusement at the scorn, smiles as if Seth is surely pulling his leg, ceases smiling. Unpacking one of the bags, Abby is following the exchange with a serious expression.

  “Maybe,” Bishop says, adding, almost pleadingly, “I mean, my God, it’s the most powerful psychedelic known to man—”

  “Nah,” Seth says, to Lewis’s surprise, shaking his head decisively. “Count me out.”

  Bishop’s face falls. “You don’t want to participate?” It’s as if the whole worth of the project were riding on his being able to give Seth this supernal drug experience, to hear Seth’s report, to debrief him.

  Seth drops his half-eaten hunk of banana bread through the hinged white plastic lid of the tall trash can. “Right, I don’t want to do the study, Bishop.”

  “May I ask why not?” Bishop asks.

  “Bishop!” Abby says. “You know I was never overjoyed about it.”

  Overjoyed? Lewis thinks. Why didn’t she forbid it? Then he remembers that you don’t forbid Seth things. You either kick him out or lock him up.

  Holding up his palms to signal reasonableness, Bishop says, “I just wanted to hear Seth’s thoughts on the matter.”

  “Sounded to me like arm-twisting,” Abby says, resuming her unpacking of the grocery bag.

  “My thoughts?” Seth says. “I’ve seen enough.” He lets that sink in. He shrugs, turns down the corners of his mouth. He can’t think of a better word: “Enough,” he says again.

  Bishop inclines his head, nodding respectfully as if to say, “Okay, that’s acceptable. I’ve felt that way myself from time to time; many psychonauts have. It’s a place we all come to.”

  At some point, Stacy has driven her wheelchair up the ramp to the threshold of the kitchen and is listening to Seth with an alert, fawn-like expression.

  “Been down enough rabbit holes,” Seth says, taking backwards steps toward the dining room. “Had enough ‘visions’ and ‘experiences,’” he says, hooking his fingers into quotes. He pauses to look around the room as if including everyone there under the category: they are inextricably part of this pathetic, substandard realm or reality he has had the misfortune to find himself marooned in.

  With that, he turns and walks out of the kitchen, followed by Cody, looking in his low-slung jeans like some royal dwarf out of Velazquez.

  Stacy rolls forward into the house then stops and hits a switch and reverses nimbly down the ramp and leaves without a word.

  Lewis and Abby and Bishop look each at a different part of the kitchen in silence. Now the sound of the stereo in Seth’s room comes on, the undertones of the music reaching across the house in jagged strokes, like the needle of an EKG.

  17

  Their heads bowed and close together, Abby and Bishop walk slowly back into the rear of the house with an air of high moral purpose. “I’m sorry, but I don’t see what that has to do with running out of coffee filters,” Abby says.

  “You’re skipping a step,” Bishop replies, his voice fading as they move away. “The extension cord I use . . . ”

  Left alone in the kitchen, Lewis lets out his breath and sits at the table for a while.

  Then he gets up and washes his face and hands at the kitchen sink. Throwing out the paper towel, he sees the trash is full. He ties off the bag and hauls it out through the garage to the plastic containers in the stall just inside the gate of the fence to the backyard.

  As he’s pushing the full bag down on top of another, the dying light in the gateway is eclipsed and he looks up to find Donald standing there, breathing hard. His T-shirt is soaked with sweat at the armpits and neckline and he exudes unpleasant, pheromonal heat and cologne-tinged funk.

  “Hi!” Lewis says with forced, casual cheerfulness. Influenced by Cody’s catalogue of possible weaponry, he’s relieved that Donald doesn’t seem to have, say, a hatchet purchased at the local hardware store. Still, he’s like a psychiatrist greeting an inmate who’s reappeared at the asylum gates after running away: handle with care.

  Looking on the verge of heatstroke, Donald holds up a finger to signal that he needs to catch his breath. Lewis wonders what to do in case of heart attack: go in and call 911. Waiting for Donald to speak or keel over, Lewis pushes down unnecessarily on the trash bag to give himself something to do,

  Having recovered enough to speak, he says, “I want to apologize for my behavior earlier,” Donald says finally.

&n
bsp; “Oh, that’s OK,” Lewis says, pushing down unnecessarily on the bag of trash to give himself something to do.

  “No,” Donald says with a quick, obstinate shake of his massive head, reversing the power dynamic: Lewis won’t be let off the hook so easily.

  “I was out of line,” he insists with an Eagle Scout sort of dutifulness.

  “Fine,” Lewis says, smiling. “Apology accepted.”

  He’s turning to go when Donald says, “Took a long walk.” He purses his lips and nods like a man in a life-insurance commercial who’s come to some sage, silvery conclusion.

  Halting out of politeness to hear the rest, Lewis thinks again about how much better Abby could do. Why the attraction to these primitives? And how many more of them, with their quirks and colognes and bathrobes, their pedestrian “insights” and “breakthroughs,” must Lewis get to know?

  “Walking helps when I need to get some ‘inner alignment,’ as your mother calls it.” He folds his thick, repellently furry arms across his chest and nods back toward the street. “Down Linden, I think it is,” he says. Like Lewis gives a shit which street it was; Lewis is keeping a journal in which he details Donald’s movements, his setbacks and revelations.

  “When I was coming back up the hill there on the third or fourth go round, my right knee started acting up. Doctor says I’ll need surgery eventually, maybe even a replacement, but I’m going to try some non-Western approaches first.”

  If Lewis had a watch on he would glance at it right now.

  Donald pauses, shakes his head. “Truth is I barely noticed,” he says quietly, “I was just so damn angry!” He bites his lower lip and holds up a finger again. “I said I was trying to get ‘aligned.’ Once I got what I thought of as aligned, I went on an inner ‘fact-finding mission.’ Do you want to know what I found out?”

  Lewis actually shakes his head: not at all, no interest, zero.

  “Fact,” Donald says, either oblivious to Lewis’s shake of the head or too needy of an audience to acknowledge it. “I live with your mother most of the week; that doesn’t necessarily make me the man of the house, but I resent your little brother trying to tell me I’m NOT the man of the house. He put his hands on me, your brother did, and I don’t tolerate that! I want you to tell him that.”

  “No, no way,” Lewis says firmly. “If you have something to say to Seth, tell him yourself, Donald.” And good luck with that.

  “Okay, fine,” Donald says, holding up his large fleshy hands. “Fair enough. But here are a few more facts for your consideration.”

  Lewis takes a step backward, toward the rear of the house. He’ll take refuge in the weeds. “Donald, you know what—”

  “Fact: your mother has decided to let Bishop live in a tent in the yard and have a ‘polyamorous’ relationship with her. Fact: I don’t like it. Fact: I’m going to try to deal with it because I was dumb enough to give it my blessing.”

  He reaches out a hand to make sure Lewis doesn’t slip away before he’s had a chance to explain. “The reason I gave my blessing—I’m so embarrassed about this now I can barely bring myself to say it. Okay, the reason I gave my blessing is we all took Ecstasy one night and I got so damn lovey-dovey on that crap that I agreed to it!”

  He looks at Lewis through squinty eyes, nodding shrewdly as if to say, Now I’ve got your attention. “He made the stuff we took that night, Bishop did. Calls himself an ‘alchemist,’ the arrogant SOB Pardon my French abbreviation. Thing is, I was stupid enough to take it, some drug he cooked up wherever he does it. I’d had a few glasses of wine, like I say. Bishop comes out with this little jeweled box. Turns out it was a great experience, don’t get me wrong. Fantastic experience. But you just can’t live up to what you feel on that stuff. Well, maybe your mother and Bishop can, but I can’t.” He laughs bitterly. “‘The Goddess,’ he calls her. How the hell do you compete with that?”

  Suddenly they’re standing in the midst of a blizzard: fibrous white puffs drift through the air.

  “You know, we ran into each other last night,” Lewis says. “In the kitchen. Do you remember that?”

  Donald frowns. “What?”

  “You were making microwave popcorn.”

  “This is a dream you had?”

  “We were really there. Seth too.”

  “No,” Donald says decisively, as if Lewis must have confused him with someone else. “I can’t eat popcorn,” Donald says. “It doesn’t agree with me.”

  The fibrous fuzz blizzard intensifies.

  “Are you taking some kind of medication maybe? I’ve heard Ambien can cause people to sleep-eat.”

  “Cottonwood fuzz,” Donald says, waving a hand in front of his face. They stand there dazed by the soothing motion. Gradually the air clears.

  Donald stoops and turns on the spigot and picks up the hose and runs water over his forearms, cooling himself down, rinsing away stray spores.

  “I could screw him with one phone call,” he says musingly, reaching up to remove a tuft from Lewis’s beard in a tender, simian gesture. “One damn phone call.”

  18

  Gar, the restaurant chosen for the Birthday Party celebration, is in a new mall on the far west side of town. Standing on line out front with Abby, Lewis gingerly prods his breastbone, which is bruised where Seth elbowed him in the pantry. It’s 8:30 but the setting sun burns at the ruled-edge bottom of a cloudless sky, flares on the stems of sunglasses and the clunky rearview mirrors of the SUV’s parked in the unshaded lot: feeding hour on an incandescent planet.

  “They specialize in lake fish from Minnesota,” Abby says. “It’s flash-frozen and flown in daily to preserve the original blandness,” she adds then laughs at Lewis’s taken-aback expression. The middle-aged man ahead of them in the longish line, his cheeks waxily closely shaven in the Middle Western manner, turns partially around at the remark: startled blue eyes.

  “Just wanted to make sure my son was listening,” Abby tells him with a wink, touching the man’s elbow. He chuckles and his date or wife glances back to get a look at Abby, who’s wearing a silky blue wraparound vintage designer dress she bought on Ebay and black high-heeled shoes. Possible polyamorous addition? Lewis wonders whether Abby sees everyone that way now.

  She’s in high spirits: the revised storm-chase website was no sooner up than a group of three lesbian couples from Oregon, all friends, booked Grateful Gaia tours for next week. She’s also looking forward to the Birthday Party celebration: fine dining as subversion of patriarchal exchange value. But for most of the drive across town to the restaurant she was on her cell to a regional polyamory person in Kansas City and now Lewis listens to her thoughts on the massage-oil incident and the confrontation between Donald and Bishop as interpreted by the polyamory “expert.” Lewis says nothing about bumping into Donald in the trash-can stall and what Donald had to say, partly to keep from adding another layer to things for Abby to parse, partly out of reluctance to bandy the family’s Ecstasy use in public. Abby turns to thinking aloud about Seth’s role in today’s conflict, his possible reasons for not wanting to take part in the DMT study, how annoyed she was at Bishop for suggesting it to begin with, how relieved she is Seth’s decided against it. Could he have had his fill of psychedelics? Or is he depressed? Or manic? She’s lowered her voice somewhat but it’s still pricking up the ears of more than one stoically waiting Wichitan. Lewis tries to join her in not caring.

  “So what’s this guy look like?” he asks as the hostess leads them to the Birthday Party table. He scans the large dining room, the booths, the large front area, the smaller back room.

  “Who, honey?” Abby asks distractedly, waving festively to her friends.

  “Astrid’s ex? The reason I’m here?”

  “Oh, God. Sorry!” She wrinkles her nose apologetically. “He’s actually sort of horrendously average—height-and weight-wise. I don’t know: even features. Short brown hair.”

  “Great, I’ll just waylay half the guys in here,” Lewis says.
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br />   “He’s not even going to show,” she assures him sotto voce as they arrive at the table. The first person he sees is, to his surprise, Tori. She bats her eyes at him like a Betty Boop raptor and waves by fiddling her fingers as if she’s greeting his crotch, which stirs as if responding to a faint but real signal. She and Seth must have found a way to come up with the entry fee—an extra shift at the peep show. And Abby is proving how big she is by including (and thereby probably bringing into line?) a rival.

  Abby introduces Lewis with glittery-eyed pride, hands on his shoulders: this is my son Lewis, our secret-service detail tonight, who just graduated from Columbia but won’t, thank God! be following in the footsteps of his academic father and father’s family!

  She then introduces the women: Gene and Joe, a couple, one of whom—Lewis immediately forgets which is which—wears a sling in which a barely visible infant sleeps. Gene and Joe are somewhat less than delighted to make Lewis’s acquaintance (is there no occasion free of men or the need for men?). Then there’s Louise, an older woman with thick white braids who looks like a kindly primatologist and who has, Abby tells him, just completed an apprenticeship to a Mongolian shaman or buu.

  “Ah,” Lewis says with polite appreciation but wondering about the wisdom of this trend, the invocation of spirits which, assuming they exist, could be demonic for all the well-meaning Louises of the world know.

  And here’s Astrid herself, gazing up under wrinkled brows as if into bright light. “You’re so thin!” she cries in a concerned, possibly disappointed, voice, and gets up to hug him tightly against her arousingly firm curves, whispering, “Thank you for doing this for me.”

  This interlude causes Tori to sit up slightly in her chair as if made sexually competitive but Lewis may be imagining this. Beside each place setting is a small flattish brightly wrapped packet—the cash, no doubt, twenty-five grand in total. He wonders which of them is leaving with it.