...I devoured the Sherlock Holmes stories at an early age; I loved them. I don’t remember how Mr. Arthur Conan Doyle spelled out the details of Holmes’s face, but here was a man whose mystery, method and essence gathered in a place just behind his eyes, and whether I read it or determined it for myself, Holmes’s eyes were, like mine, gray. I was nine or ten years old. I became a fiend for the finer points of deductive reasoning. I’d walk onto the school playground, examine the gravelly sand beneath the swing set, and determine whether the previous swingers had jumped or fallen off. At home, my mother’s face was a complex tapestry of tiny stresses and rewards—of minor victories and, far more numerous, small things gone majorly wrong.
It’s amazing to realize I can recall with detail “cases” I worked, that far back—I must have repeated and run over the facts so many times that my memory couldn’t help but encode them. The disappearance and stealthy recovery of my wristwatch—the one that currently lay on Etta’s pillow—was a very proud moment for me. The watch is and was old, and has Donald Duck on it. The blue leather strap has gold stitching, and the white face is bordered with gold-painted metal. In the center stands an 0pen-beaked Donald, wearing his standard outfit: blue hat, blue coat, no pants. He’s pointing to the numbers around him with arms that have long since stopped rotating; attached to these are hands that do not belong together: his right hand has an extended middle finger and the thumb raised to make the pistol sign, which can generally mean either bam or way to go, sport. So we’re okay there. But then the shorter left hand, the hour hand, is bent at the wrist, the white fingers splayed stylishly, suggestively. If gay cartoon ducks have a system of hand signs, this is the one that says, I’m busy just now, but later, I’m yours every way you want me. Gail never detected the sexual ambiguity of Donald’s fingers; but she did detect, or at least invent, an offensive sexuality on the part of the man who gave me the watch. He was my Little League baseball assistant coach, Ted, and after I failed to get a crucial hit in the last game of the season, he presented it to me as a gift. He’d had it since he was a boy.
I really took that to heart; Donald Duck was not my favorite Disney character, by any means, but his voice was funny, and I realized the intent of the gift: don’t over-think, don’t be all angrily serious about this kind of very minor situation. About baseball. But Gail thought the gift was inappropriate; she took the watch from me and stashed it away. I spent every spare moment surreptitiously trying to recover the Donald. I looked in all the usual stash locations, racking my nubile brain, killing myself. Then I thought of Sherlock. Hardly for the first time—I even had the hat. I’d shut myself in my room, put it on, and pace back and forth, eyes narrowed, thinking about the problem at hand, sometimes aloud. Ah, there you are, Watson. Outstanding. Have you seen my pipe, one can’t be expected to walk properly around the crime scene without a pipe, a decent pipe. Procurement of a pipe is to be our top priority, once this case of the missing Donald is solved; although that will be a tricky business all by itself … a tricky business. I often repeated my last words, after a pause—and even then I knew this was very un-Holmes, but hell, my Watson was imaginary, speaking Watson’s part aloud mad me sound crazy. I allowed myself leeway. As much as I was the eager detective, the mysteries I pursued were never about whodunit; they were exclusively whereisit in nature. As much as I scoured the tattered, faux-leather-bound volume of the collected Holmes stories, his method didn’t translate, because I was interested in finding, not blaming. I wanted to know location, not motive. But I didn’t know of this discrepancy; and so I tried many other things to rectify it.
Prone though I am to working a heavy psychological angle when thinking back on the way I was as a boy, the answer, here, is that I had a lot of time alone; and I had an eye that was curious for the way things worked. This meant Peter Pan was great, but Robin Hood was better. I was rarely asked how I felt, so I rarely considered my feelings of much import. For all intents and purposes, Sherlock Holmes possessed no feelings not expressed in solving cases and occasionally manhandling his violin, and so he was a fascinating model of behavior for me.
The Case of the Missing Donald was a turning point—for the first time, motive was relevant. Feelings were relevant. Gail felt that Coach Ted had been wrong to give me the watch, so she stepped in and took it from me. Okay, she’s acting on feelings, here, so she’s not planning it out, she’s reacting. What happened next. We were leaving the game. We got in the station wagon and she was yelling, not really at me, to me. She looked at my face, silent but murderous, and saw that while I hadn’t showed much care for the game—I’d taken my shoes and socks off in left field and was still barefoot—I sure as hell cared about that watch; I wasn’t going to bend. So she got out of the car and stormed back to the dugout, where she proceeded to talk normally to Coach Ted for a few seconds, then explode, waving her arms everywhere while stepping towards him, which was just so awful—I looked away. She was wearing her little knit vest that she wore in the springtime—it had a lot of pockets, many places to conceal a small Donald Duck wristwatch. Even as she got back in the wagon, I was already in detective mode, sizing up any apparent pocket bulk, and, when we got back, tracing every movement of Gail and the vest in order to pick up the trail that’d lead me to the Donald’s resting place. I was more stealthy and thorough than I’d ever been, and came up empty. I ran through the scene, again, again, again, trying to make my memory pull up some sliver of detail, or to derive likely locations. That night was sleepless, and I climbed out of my window and walked almost five miles to the baseball field, where I scoured the tall-ish grass close to the dugouts, eventually collapsing there, leaning my tired back against the wire fence and staring up at the generous light of the May moon. Why, I asked the moon. Why can’t I find Donald. He must be somewhere—she never throws anything away, she hates to throw things away. And, my friend, that’s when it clicked: she hates throwing things away. The motive I was interested in was not motive for the crime—Gail’s feelings about the Donald watch had no bearing, here. But suddenly I had this new scent, a trace of motive for what she’d do with the watch: Gail could not bear to throw things away; she went around with this particular hatred right on the tip of her mind or tongue—throwing things out was a waste, and this policy governed many things, even how much food first came on my plate at dinner. Waste not/want not, the truism said, and the first part governed Gail’s daily decisions. I leaned against the dugout fence, still staring at the moon, and realized that she’d given the watch back to Assistant Coach Ted. She’d yelled at his uncomprehending face and waved her arms wildly about gift-giving and role models, and then she’d turned and walked calmly back to the car, after handing him back the watch. So that it wouldn’t go to waste. That was the last game of the season; I wouldn’t see Assistant Coach Ted again. I was so excited about this, I marveled at it enough that I began walking towards Assistant Coach Ted’s neighborhood before talking myself out of it. It was late, I didn’t know which house was his. He probably still had the watch. It’d been his before, and he hadn’t offered it to me in a way that suggested he’d offered it to the better players first. No, he was holding onto it, until such a time as I could come forward and accept his old Donald Duck wristwatch like a man.
I’d anticipated having time to discuss what I knew, and how I’d come to know it, when Assistant Coach Ted gave me the watch for a second time. But when I came to his door that Sunday afternoon, he was a little short with me, restless, by no means convinced I was there on my own. I looked down at the welcome mat and apologized for my mother’s yelling. Assistant Coach Ted let out a laugh—thank god, he said. I was second-guessing the good things I thought about you that made me give you that watch—hold on, I’ll be right back.
He brought out the Donald Duck watch and escorted me to the edge of the front yard, where he lit a cigar. Leaning back against his car, a cherry Chevy Nova, he rotated his cigar in small, quick turns, taking a short puff with each twist. I’d no idea, at the time, how a cigar was smoked, but it was undoubtedly a close relative of the pipe, which I wanted to smoke very much, and this cat knew what he was doing. I stood a few feet in front of him, studying, his technique, and marveling at the thick curls of pungent smoke. Assistant Coach Ted looked thoughtfully down the quiet road, then down at me, tousled my moppy hair, and chuckled. He told me to enjoy my watch and went back to his cigar. I backed away from him a few steps, then turned and trotted down the street, becoming more happy and running faster as I went. It was my see you around, kid moment, a moment of recognition between me and a solitary, cigar-smoking man.
1 comment:
MMM-so good. :)
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