Making the Kids Laugh

Justin told the kids we might not be able to go to Christmas this year even though I told his ass not to say anything about it yet. We were in the living room in front of the TV which is where we were when I first told him the FedEx plant was closing next year. We had Shark Tank on and I muted it.

“Oh shit,” said Justin at the time. “The FedEx plant?”

“Please don’t say anything about Christmas,” I told him, keeping my voice down, nodding my head toward the kids’ room. “Shyla might not care, but Walter and Jeneva won’t take it quietly.”

It wasn’t the first time a company pulled out of Danville. We’d heard this news before. Our parents too, and their parents, and so on.

“We can’t fix the van to go to Arizona this year,” is what Justin told the kids when they asked. We were back in the living room watching Shark Tank again. The lightbulb in the corner lamp was burnt out. I really did think maybe I could find something else with the school district or maybe at the towing company with Justin’s parents, but he didn’t wait for me to find out.

“What the hell, Justin?” I said.

“What’s the use in keeping secrets from ‘em?”

“Well?” I said, pointing at Jeneva and Walter who sobbed within seconds.

“Why can’t we go to grandma’s?” asked Shyla, always the investigator.

“I just said because we can’t fix the van, Shyla,” said Justin.

“But why?”

“Stop,” I said, holding my hand up like a stop sign. She made a mother proud with her grades, but she was always a handful. She’d be someone else’s handful someday, I always joked. “Don’t upset the babies,” I told her. Walter and Jeneva had dropped the iPad on the carpet and were hugging each other, heartbroken about Christmas.

“I didn’t upset them,” said Shyla, who looked right at Justin.

“Girl,” he said. “Don’t At me. Not tonight.”

“Oh my god,” she said, which is what she said again on Friday when we told her we were going to the hockey game that night.

“What is your problem this week?” I said. She wasn’t the one getting laid off.

“It’s a waste of money,” she said. “The team hasn’t won since October.”

“What difference does that make to you?” I said with Judge Judy on mute in the living room. “Go put your coat on.”

Walter and Jeneva were still sad at the hockey game, even sharing the iPad, which usually distracted them from anything. You could’ve gotten me with a rubik's cube or a jump rope at their age, but now it has to be something plugged in.

When the referees skated out after the first Zamboni, Justin started yelling out of nowhere and it made me jump at first.

“Boo,” he yelled. “Get a real job!” It startled Walter and Jeneva too and I reached my arm across the back of their seats. Justin was on the other side of me. Shyla sat behind us and was pretending to read one of the Boxcar Children books, but there was no way. She’d read those all like three times already. I think she was doing it for show. One of the refs looked up at us and grinned.

“Yeah, you, asshole,” Justin yelled and pointed at him. “Fuck you!”

“Wow,” muttered Shyla, and that’s how it went for a while, with Justin yelling random shit to make the kids laugh.

“Get a fuckin’ wig,” he yelled when the ref took off his helmet to towel off his bald head. Walter and Jeneva laughed and put the iPad down and Justin noticed, so he kept it going. “You bald fuck! Your head looks like a hard-boiled egg!” The babies laughed.

In the second period, after the kids spilled half a walking taco all over themselves, I yelled, “Goddamnit,” and Walter repeated it, which made Justin laugh, but he stopped when I looked at him.

“Hey, buddy,” Justin said to Walter. “Not at home, alright?”

“Okay,” said Walter, then he yelled, “Goddamnit,” again and Jeneva started giggling.

“This is so stupid,” said Shyla, then she got up to go be by herself somewhere.

The refs missed a high sticking call and Justin yelled, “Guess he was too busy with a dick in his mouth to see it!” A player from the Monroe Moccasins went to the penalty box and Justin yelled, “Welcome to Danville, bitch!” When that player looked back at us, Justin yelled, “You look like a goblin-ass pussy!”

“What?” I said, but the babies started giggling so Justin yelled, “You look like fucking Gandalf!” At that point I watched a girl, I think it was Wendy Litchfield’s kid, walk up to the side of the penalty box, her real hands concealed within the sleeves of her hoodie as she waved at the player with tiny plastic toy hands instead.

One of our guys on the Danville Dashers got boarded hard by an opponent, so I called that Monroe Moccasin a bitch and then I yelled at our guy: “Put him on his ass next time!” The player in the penalty box stood up, so we yelled at him to sit back down. He glanced at us and laughed. Then Shyla came back after a while, looking like she’d seen a ghost or something.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s your book?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“How do you not know?”

She crossed her arms instead of answering me. Meanwhile, the babies laughed at Justin yelling at the ref again: “Bald ass hoe! Get some fuckin’ Rogaine, Mr. Potatohead!” They forgot about the iPad. Goddamn Justin. I’ve spent half my life taking care of his ass and you can bet I’ll spend the next half on him too.

Abraham Lincoln’s Ghost Conjured, David S. Palmer Arena, Danville, IL

A surprising fact scarcely ascertained by common people across these modernized United States proves that exactly five repetitions of my name uttered aloud while gazing into any reflective surface within the boundaries of the historic Eighth Judicial Circuit of Illinois is a method known on occasion to summon my ethereal presence. But I am not the real Abraham Lincoln. I hold certain traces of memories, not within any kind of human mind as the living understand it, for I possess no mind of such a nature, but without my occupation, surrounding me, flickering vestiges of orbiting light, images of union, emancipation, officiants and statesmen clustered at a blood-soaked deathbed, mourners weeping, all flickering and dimming since I’ve known time. But I am not exactly the dead man resting with his dead family. I know this with certainty, for I would be deep down, if I was so, buried with kin, of which I have none. If the spirits of those others buried in the Oak Ridge vault have been conjured then it was elsewhere in a bygone time and without me, or maybe yet to be, or perhaps never to be. In any case, for whoever conjures me there is a blurring of what I am and who I resemble, a lack of comprehension, and in this moment a young schoolgirl who has brought me into the present in the city of Danville, Illinois exhibits no exception.

Upon invoking my spirit, the living are liable to see the image figuratively conjured in their mind’s eye, but only for an instant which will never be possible to substantiate. I cannot recall my prior conjurations in great detail, but there is an inkling that my appearance has driven some to madness. I now stand forth as a man of exceptional height aged into his fifth decade, dressed in a long black coat and silk stovepipe tophat, sporting a well-manicured beard in accordance with this principle. The adolescent girl finds apparent my reflection in the mirror behind her, loses hold of a small book, and then, short of breath, vacates the room on light feet. She has summoned me via a wall-mounted mirror within a toilet facility of a design contemporary to this century, although no one else is present. The excited sounds of a crowd carry through the threshold which the girl has passed through. As I begin my slow dissolve back into the ether, I find the text on the discarded book’s face to read, The Boxcar Children, The Mystery of the Hidden Painting. I do not know what this means. I know only that I am not meant to be here long.

Without any indication made explicit to me that I am in Danville, I feel strong lingering traces of familiarity with this place, a deep nostalgia building impossibly into an ache that should only be apprehended by one’s corporeal body, but still flashes across my entire sensory purview as does lightning’s searing branches through a thundercloud. Strange odors draw me from the room and into a transitional area holding an abundance of people donning flamboyantly-colored clothing standing behind one another and waiting for their turn at a counter which stands before a blackboard with various nonsensical phrases listed: Hot Dog, Chili Dog, Pulled-Pork Sandwich, Walking Taco, Soft Pretzel, Nachos w/ Cheese, with what looks like prices of sale listed which would constitute greater than half the monthly salary of a private in Meade’s Army of the Potomac.

Inside the enclosed coliseum, I feel some sense of familiarity in discovering that I am not the only ghost in attendance of this crowded event set on a surface of what appears to be pure ice; however, I cannot name this other ghost. Additionally, my understanding of Roman style competitions from my living-self’s days spent perusing books evokes a sense of peace, however odd this game may be: Men clad in heavy uniforms and bulky adornments with blades fastened onto their boots are divided into two groups based on the colors they wear, perhaps a microcosm of the past, a reenactment of the war between the States. These men glide atop the icy surface with a fluid gracefulness interrupted only by a competitor’s collision which is perhaps intentional. The men carry long staffs terminating in paddle-like heads with which they manipulate a black piece of hard material formed into a flat cylinder. People shout from a tiered amphitheatre, where I assume the political, senatorial class of them are permitted in closer seats with a better view.

A man shouts, “Hit someone!” And another, “Blow the whistle out your ass next time!” And another which gives me pause, a curious phrase, “Pussy ass whore!” Hmmm. Whore, I think, is self-evident. Ass, a beast of burden or a mark of low estimation of character in comparison to one’s posterior? The context is uncertain and remains less than clear when preceded by the word pussy, which I find particularly confusing. The significance of any association between felines and asses and whores eludes my comprehension in my attempt to draw together some type of connection in the context of this competition of sport.

I fade further. Maybe this world of gauche banality and strange contradiction and dissonance that bears no logical, causal sequence of connection from one sensory detail to the next is what I would have sacrificed myself for when I viewed myself as a man, rather than an it or that as in, “Oh my God, what is that?” E pluribus unum. I sense the violent competition unfolding over three segments: beginning, middle, end. But in which of these segments does the historic Eight District now reside? The beginning I hope, for the sake of the little girl who dropped her book, for all of the readers of books. May the end be far over the horizon, I whisper. My eyes roll back. The other ghost watches me attenuate into the vaporous void of memory.

In the Future, Shyla McMahon Dreams of Danville, IL

 When Shyla lies back down after drinking a glass of water and falls asleep again and finds herself in a lucid dream in a dank utility room standing with her arms at her sides in the depths of the catacombs of the Art Institute but not so deep to cancel out the city sounds of sirens and horns and wheels clunking against metal road grating cars backfiring she wonders how did I get down here this room doesn’t exist in real life I know I’m asleep next to my husband in my luxury apartment on Michigan Avenue but everything in the room looks so real the grime and cobwebs collected in the corners and the pipes leaking brown water at the corroding seams of rusted valves the bluegray utility box’s maintenance schedule sticker half torn off with fading notes etched in pencil flourescent lights flickering the rumble of a furnace nearby and no doorway to enter or exit the room how did I get here Shyla wonders how do I get out of here then she notices on the cinderblock wall a massive genre painting dimensions eighty-one point seven inches by one hundred twenty-one point two-five inches she leans close to read the small placard centered on the frame giving the title of the painting as Still Life at Lincoln Lanes and the artist as Georges Seurat but this is impossible thinks Shyla this painting is not real Georges Seurat never came to the bowling alley in my hometown and did a painting in a pointilistic style he’s been dead for over a hundred years she wonders how long before she wakes up she reaches into her pocket finds a smartphone and photographs the painting then opens the notes app and begins typing out the alt text the landscape oriented open composition reveals the main interior of the Lincoln Lanes bowling alley in Danville, IL with a scene unfolding in the center of the frame involving what appears to be two EMTs in navy blue uniforms lifting a person from the floor toward an ambulance stretcher the person’s leg lifted up in front of their face conceals their identity from the viewer their reflections visible in the sheen of the floor behind the EMTs stand two police officers waiting aimlessly a group of men wearing identical black and orange hockey uniforms with their black helmets sticks in hand and ice skates waits beyond the police officers the blades cutting into the wooden floor of the approach with other people probably the fans standing among the hockey players dressed in the same orange and black colors the Lincoln Lanes logo painted on the far wall just in front of the EMTs a family kneels on the floor with their hands folded in prayer at the left of the frame a crowd of people possibly adolescents all wearing what looks like the same maroon-colored high school letter jackets sit at tables with breaded chicken wings arranged neatly on paper plates in front of them maybe one hundred of these kids with one in the back fussing with a jukebox in the foreground to the right of the frame in front of the bowling lanes sits a group of people unaffiliated with everyone else waiting at their lanes in the foreground to the left a woman stands behind a counter crowded with the high schoolers behind her a wall of cubby holes containing pairs of bowling shoes and grasps a microphone on the counter with both hands and appears to be shouting into the microphone there are public address system speakers visible on the ceiling at the corners of the painting with black squiggly marks indicating a stylistic evocation of sound emanating from said speakers almost like a cartoon the woman shouting into the microphone appears to be angry behind her an unattended full bar at the center of a circular room filled with electronic slot machines and neon signs advertising cheap beer brands is surrounded by the letter jacket high schoolers leaning across the bar and reaching for slender bottles filled with clear and amber liquid illuminated from below further to the left of that and separated by the partition of a cross-sectioned wall is the street in front of the building with no fewer than eight police sedans lined up their red and blue lights flashing a number of police officers are crowded in the dark outside under a streetlamp lighting up broken glass on the sidewalk questioning a man whose arms are held out as if emphatically explaining something in the uppermost left corner a full moon shines above every single person in the painting has their head turned directly toward the viewer regardless of the action they are in the midst of carrying out Shyla looks up again from the notes app and sees the person being carried onto the stretcher now seems to have their head tilted to the side in order to see the viewer directly as do the police and the high schoolers and the praying family why are they looking at me Shyla wonders she opens her mouth to ask but nothing comes out she remembers the scene of Jeneva and Walter’s birthday party with the hockey team she looks back down to reread the alt text in the notes app and once more looks up and finds Abraham Lincoln watching her from the shadowy recesses behind the pins in the farthest lane but wakes up to a hand on her shoulder rocking her body.

“What’s the matter, babe?”

“You were talking in your sleep.”

“About what?”

“You said, ‘No one knew them. Know one knew where they had come from.’”

“Oh,” says Shyla.

Snowflakes fall in the beam of a spotlight mounted on Shyla’s building. She stays awake and thinks about her brother and sister and the bowling alley in Danville. Outside, the wind murmurs across her windows. Ambulance sirens wane like an ebbing tide.