There's Something I Want You to Do

On their free nights when they’ve arranged for a babysitter, Benny and Jane go dancing, her particular hobby. He has mastered most of the ballroom steps. When they tango, he drags her passionately across the studio floor. They stare into each other’s eyes, glowering with the formalized lust that their tango instructor demands. In Jane’s arms Benny has gained a kind of manly confidence. Also, Jane loves kisses. “Mommy kisses a lot,” Julian has observed with affectionate irritability, wiping his face off boy-style after having had another Jane-kiss planted on his cheek or forehead. Her one deficit — a small one — is that she cannot make Benny laugh, and so she never tries. Besides, Julian, a boyish image of Sarah, has already grasped the essentials to being the class clown, and he has learned how to entertain his twin brothers and reduce them to giggles. Whenever Benny sees Julian laughing, his mind fogs over a bit. Julian may grow up to be a joker and a troublemaker, but Benny no longer tries to imagine his oldest son’s future, and in any case, what Julian might do in life is, as people say, another story altogether.

Charity

1.

He had fallen into bad trouble. He had worked in Ethiopia for a year — teaching in a school and lending a hand at a medical clinic. He had eaten all the local foods and been stung by the many airborne insects. When he’d returned to the States, he’d brought back an infection — the inflammation in his knees and his back and his shoulders was so bad that sometimes he could hardly stand up. Probably a viral arthritis, his doctor said. It happens. Here: have some painkillers.

Borrowing a car, he drove down from Minneapolis to the Mayo Clinic, where after two days of tests the doctors informed him that they would have no firm diagnosis for the next month or so. Back in Minneapolis, through a friend of a friend, he visited a wildcat homeopathy treatment center known for traumatic-pain-relief treatments.

The center, in a strip-mall storefront claiming to be a weight loss clinic (weight no more), gave him megadoses of meadowsweet, a compound chemically related to aspirin. After two months without health insurance or prescription coverage, he had emptied his bank account, and he gazed at the future with shy dread.

Through another friend of a friend, he managed to get his hands on a few superb prescription painkillers, the big ones, gifts from heaven. With the aid of these pills, he felt like himself again. He blessed his own life. He cooked some decent meals; he called his boyfriend in Seattle; he went around town looking for a job; he made plans to get himself to the Pacific Northwest. When the drugs ran out and the pain returned, worse this time, like being stabbed in his knees and shoulders, along with the novelty of addiction’s chills and fevers, the friend of a friend told him that if he wanted more pills at the going street rate, he had better go see Black Bird. He could find Black Bird at the bar of a club, The Lower Depths, on Hennepin Avenue. “He’s always there,” the friend of a friend said. “He’s there now. He reads. The guy sits there studying Shakespeare. Used to be a scholar or something. Pretends to be a Native American, one of those impostor types. Very easy to spot. I’ll tell him you’re coming.”

The next Wednesday, he found Black Bird at the end of The Lower Depths bar near the broken jukebox and the sign for the men’s room. The club’s walls had been built from limestone and rust-red brick and sported no decorative motifs of any kind. If you needed decorations around you when you drank, you went somewhere else. The peculiar orange lighting was so dim that Quinn couldn’t figure out how Black Bird could read at all.

Quinn approached him gingerly. Black Bird’s hair went down to his shoulders. The gray in it looked as if it had been applied with chalk. He wore bifocals and moved his finger down the page as he read. Nearby was a half-consumed bottle of 7UP.

“Excuse me. Are you Black Bird?”

Without looking up, the man said, “Why do you ask?”

“I’m Quinn.” He held out his hand. Black Bird did not take it. “My friend Morrow told me about you.”

“Ah-huh,” Black Bird said. He glanced up with an impatient expression before returning to his book. Quinn examined the text. Black Bird was reading Othello, the third act.

“Morrow said I should come see you. There’s something I need.”

Black Bird said nothing.

“I need it pretty bad,” Quinn said, his hand trembling inside his pocket. He wasn’t used to talking to people like this. When Black Bird didn’t respond, Quinn said, “You’re reading Othello.” Quinn had acquired a liberal arts degree from a college in Iowa, where he had majored in global political solutions, and he felt that he had to assert himself. “The handkerchief. And Iago, right?”

Black Bird nodded. “This isn’t College Bowl,” he said dismissively. With his finger stopped on the page, he said, “What do you want from me?”