Jack cocked his head. “Listening,” he said. “All ears.” He said this with as much sarcasm as he could.
Fish-Eyes walked around to the other side of Jack’s car, opened the door, and brought out the bottle of whiskey in its plastic bag. “What’s this?” he asked, walking back toward Jack.
Jack put his arms down and said, “I told your friend, it’s whiskey. Come on, you can see that. For the love of Christ.”
Fish-Eyes stepped close to Jack then, and Jack backed away, except there was nowhere to go, his car was right there. “Now you tell me again what you just said,” Fish-Eyes directed.
“I said it’s whiskey, and you can see that. And then I said something about Christ. Something about Christ and love.”
“You’ve been drinking,” Fish-Eyes said. “You have been drinking, sir.” And his voice held something so ugly that Jack was sobered. Fish-Eyes dropped the bag with the whiskey onto the driver’s seat of Jack’s car.
“I have,” Jack said. “I had a drink at the Regency bar in Portland.”
From his back pocket Fish-Eyes brought something forward; it was small enough to be held in one hand, yet square-looking and gray, and Jack said, “Jesus, are you going to taser me?”
Fish-Eyes smiled, he smiled! He stepped toward Jack holding out the thing, and Jack said, “Please, come on.” He held his arms against his chest; he was really frightened.
“Breathe in this,” said Fish-Eyes, and a little hose appeared from the thing he was holding.
Jack put his mouth on the little hose and breathed.
“Again,” said Fish-Eyes, moving closer to Jack.
Jack took another breath, then took his mouth off the hose. Fish-Eyes looked at the thing closely and said, “Well, well, you are just under the legal limit.” He put the hose gadget back into his pocket and said to Jack, “He’s writing you up a ticket, and after he gives it to you, I suggest you get in your car and drive straight to a place that gets this car inspected, do you understand me, sir?”
Jack said, “Yes.” Then he said, “May I get back in my car now?”
Fish-Eyes leaned toward him. “Yes, you can get back in your car now.”
So Jack sat himself in the driver’s seat, which was low to the ground since it was a sports car, and put the whiskey onto the seat next to him, and waited for the huge man to bring him a ticket, but Fish-Eyes stood right there as though Jack might bolt.
And then—from the corner of his eye—Jack saw something he would never be sure about and would never forget. The policeman’s crotch was right at Jack’s eye level, and Jack thought—he thought but looked away quickly—that the guy might be getting a boner. There was a bulge there bigger than— Jack glanced up at the man’s face, and the guy was staring down at Jack with his sunglasses on.
The huge man came over and gave Jack the ticket, and Jack said, “Thank you very much, fellows. I’ll be off now.” And he drove slowly away. But Fish-Eyes followed him all the way down the turnpike until Jack came to the exit for Crosby, and when Jack took that exit the guy did not follow him but headed on straight up the turnpike. Jack let out a yell: “Get yourself some tighty-whities, like every other man in this state!”
Jack took a deep breath and said, “Okay. It’s okay. It’s over.” He drove the eight miles into Crosby, and on the way he said, “Betsy. Betsy! Wait until I tell you what happened to me. You’re not going to believe this one, Betts.” He allowed himself this, the conversation with her about what had just happened to him. “Thanks, Betsy,” he said, and what he meant was thanks for being so nice about the prostate surgery. Which she had been; there was no doubt about that. All his life Jack had been an undershorts man. Never for him those tighty-whities, but in Crosby, Maine, you couldn’t buy any undershorts. This had amazed him. And Betsy had gone to Freeport for him, and bought his undershorts there. Then his prostate surgery, almost one year ago, forced him to give up the undershorts. He needed a place to put the stupid pad. How he hated it! And right now, as though on cue, he felt a squirt—not a dribble—come from him. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said out loud. The whole state, it seemed, wore tighty-whities; just recently Jack had gone to the Walmart on the outskirts of town to buy one more package of them, and he had noticed there were no undershorts there either. Just a slab of tighty-whities sized all the way to XXX-Large for all those poor fat men, huge men, in this state. But Betsy had gone to Freeport and found him undershorts there. Oh, Betsy! Betsy!
* * *
Home, Jack had trouble believing what had happened during the day, it all seemed ridiculous and somehow—almost—incidental. He sat for a long time in his big chair, looking at the living room; it was a spacious room with a low blue couch on metal legs that stretched along a few feet from the wall facing the television, then went at a right angle along the other area of the room, with a metal-legged glass coffee table in front. Then Jack turned in his chair and stared through the windows at the field of grass and the trees beyond, their leaves bright green. He and Betsy had agreed that they liked the view of this field more than any view of the water, and as he remembered this a warmth trembled through him. Finally he rose, poured himself some whiskey, and boiled four hot dogs on the stove. He kept shaking his head while he opened a can of baked beans. “Betsy,” he said out loud a few times. When he was through eating and had rinsed the dishes—he did not put them in the dishwasher, that seemed too much trouble—he had one more glass of whiskey and got to thinking of Betsy being so in love with that Tom Groger fellow. Oh, what a strange thing a life was—
But filled with a sense of goodwill—the day was almost over and the whiskey was working—Jack sat at his computer and googled the fellow, Tom Groger. He found the man; he was apparently still teaching at that private high school for girls in Connecticut; he’d be eight years younger than Jack. But only girls? Still? Jack scrolled through and saw they’d been accepting young men for about ten years. Then he found a small picture of Tom Groger; he had gray hair now, he was thin, you could see that in his face, which seemed pleasant enough, and very bland to Jack’s eyes. There was an email address for him attached to the school’s site. So Jack wrote to him. “My wife, Betsy (Arrow as you would have known her), died seven months ago, and I know she loved you very much in her youth. I thought you might want to know about her death.” He pressed SEND.
Jack sat back and looked at the light that was changing on the trees. These long, long evenings; they were so long and beautiful, it just killed him. The field was darkening, the trees behind it were like pieces of black canvas, but the sky still sent down the sun, which sliced gently across the grass on the far end of the field. His mind went back over the day and it seemed he could make no sense of it. Had that guy really had a boner? It seemed impossible, yet Jack knew—in a way, he knew—the feeling of anger and power that might have produced it. If the guy had even been getting one. And then Jack thought of the ants that were still going about trying to get their sand wherever they needed it to go. They seemed almost heartbreaking to him, in their tininess and their resilience.