Planet Reese. Cordelia Strube
is just a rodent whereas Reese has watched Bonaparte and knows how clever he is. Late at night they would sit at the kitchen table together. To liven things up Reese would place a wastebasket near the edge of the table and Bonaparte would leap into it and tunnel around in the dirty Kleenexes. After a few minutes, Reese would carefully lift him out and put him back on the table enabling Bonaparte to again leap into the wastebasket. Once, Bonaparte escaped. Reese despaired, certain that the hamster would die of dehydration in a crevice. He left the cage open and put it on the floor. Within an hour Bonaparte had found his way back to his cage, his home. Reese told Roberta of this extraordinary feat, hoping to impress her with the hamster’s savvy. “How difficultis it for him to smell his own piss?” Roberta said.
It scares him how he is growing to hate her.
He did not intend to go drinking with Robert Vinkle, who has insisted that he call him Bob. But the prospect of returning to the basement apartment or loitering in a twenty-four-hour doughnut joint — avoiding headlines about ecological disaster — depressed him. Although, even at Vinkle’s — the bar owned by Bob — his eye is caught by “Drug Taint in Canadian Water” and by the man with long fingernails and greasy hair parted in the middle on the other side of the paper. He notices Reese glancing at the headline and taps it. “Whatever happens to the frogs happens to us,” he warns. “Boys getting born with no balls.”
“Mutations nothing,” Mrs. Ranty interjects. “We’re talking altered DNA!”
“We’re talkeeng freakss breeding freakss!” Scout Leader Igor adds.
The long-fingernailed man taps a photo of a twenty-two-month-old girl with breasts. Reese looks away, at the television on which a middle-aged Boston couple describe the Cabbage Patch doll they’ve raised as a son for nineteen years. He has his own playroom and a red Corvette. They plan to send him to university. “He makes friends easily,” Joe, the slope-headed father, says. “He’s great to know.” The mother, Bonny, gripping the edges of her track suit, adds, “He does a lot of things with his dad. He’s like most boys.” Their real-life daughter, Vicky, an associate at Wal-Mart, says, “He got a dog. I never got a dog.”
Bob has made it clear that Reese’s drinks are on the house. Not that Reese wants more drinks, but he’s hoping that several will provide an anaesthetic effect. After pouring them beers, Bob leads Reese to a table in the corner. In the banquet hall, Reese mentioned his trial separation, to which Bob responded, “I’m there, brother.” In the truck on the way to Vinkle’s, Bob told Reese that he’d gotten “a good hit” off him, which “doesn’t happen too often.” Reese senses that Bob needs to talk, that varicose veins are the least of his concerns.
“She was jiggin’ her assistant,” Bob says. “While I was out busting my ass. I heard it from one of the waitresses, she said it’d been going on for months, even before Alicia told me to move out. You know what she said? She said, ‘We never see you, Bob, you’re always at the bar. I want somebody who can be around.’ The whole time she was going at it with her assistant.”
“I’m sorry,” Reese says.
“So I go over there after work, it’s like two in the morning or something, and I start pounding on the door. She won’t open it so I break it down. She’s in her bathrobe and I say, ‘Where is he?’ and she says, ‘What are you talking about?’, that kind of shite, so I push her out of the way and start heading upstairs and she starts grabbing at me and saying ‘He’s in the closet, leave him alone, we all know you’re the big man.’ I just about clubbed her.” Bob drinks more beer and pushes a dish of peanuts towards Reese. “So, like, at this point I know I can kill him and that this might not be the way to go, so I shout, ‘Don’t come down here or I’ll kill you.’ Meanwhile she’s gone and called 911.”
The beer tastes sour and Reese’s eyes are burning from the grease-laden vapour emanating from the kitchen. A waitress with a lip ring and scarlet hair navigates the greasy pathways in the broadloom, stopping before Bob. “Can I have Friday off? I got to take my kid to the dentist.”
He winces. “You need all day to take your kid to the dentist?”
“It’s at the dental school. It’s not like you provide me with health insurance so I can go to a decent dentist where they have actual appointments.”
“Whatever,” Bob says, waving his hand, looking back at Reese. “So the cops charge me with uttering death threats and breaking and entering. They shove me in a cruiser and tell me they know three cops in jail for the exact same reason I’m going to be wearing the orange jumpsuit. They came home late and found some guy in bed with the wife.” Sitting beside a “My Goodness, My Guinness” mirror, Reese shakes his head to suggest disbelief, catching a glimpse of himself that is not cheering. He seems to have aged ten years, and his haircut, done by Corrado the barber for eight bucks, does not flatter him.
“Four days I was in there,” Bob says. “Had to share a cell with a guy who shot somebody in the head and slugged me if I flushed the toilet too early.”
Around them sit couples in various states of courtship. Reese can’t imagine being one of them, can’t imagine having the stamina for getting-to-know-you conversations and gropings in the dark.
“So now I’m under house arrest for six weeks,” Bob says. “I’m allowed to go to work, that’s it.”
“But you went to Golf Day,” Reese says.
“Do me a favour, don’t advertise it.”
“Sorry.”
“So, it makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
“What?”
“Who this person is you hooked up with.” Bob eats another peanut. “It makes you wonder.”
“It does.”
“My mother never liked her.”
“My mother doesn’t like mine either.”
“Is that right? Well, it just goes to show.”
“What?”
“Mother knows best.”
Reese stares at a Smithwicks Ale mirror. In its reflection he sees a couple leaning into one another over a plate of chicken fingers. Their attentive looks suggest that they have yet to fornicate, that they’re in the process of imagining that the earth will move.
“Is your wife zoomin’ anybody?” Bob asks.
“It’s a possibility, yet to be confirmed.”
“Go over and confirm it.”
“I don’t think so.” He would, in fact, like to break down the door to the house that was once his and utter death threats to the art student and Roberta, but he senses that this would not position him well for a child custody battle. And anyway, he still has keys. He gave Roberta his while he snuck the spare set. “Are there children?” he asks.
“One,” Bob mutters. “She’s only two, she’ll forget about me. She’ll be calling that jerk-off ‘Daddy’ in no time.” Reese hadn’t considered that a new man in Roberta’s life — even an art student — might be called Daddy.
“So she gets two chances to show up in court,” Bob says, “before they drop the charges.”
“Is there a chance she won’t show up?”
“I’m hoping she’ll come to her senses.”
Only now does it occur to Reese that Robert Vinkle might be unbalanced. Only the unbalanced would suggest that his wife needs to come to her senses when he is the one who has broken down a door and uttered death threats. Reese’s native bird book has taught him that crows torment owls during the daytime when owls require sleep. With their vision diminished in daylight,