A Few Corrections by Brad Leithauser

Author:Brad Leithauser [Leithauser, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307424334
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2009-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

“You don’t look well,” Conrad tells me. We’re marching across a parking lot under a punishing Miami sun that lashes you from two directions—down from a hazy sky and up from the blazing asphalt. His remark seems like a preemptive strike. I don’t look well? When I’ve met him recently, it’s been evening and we’ve sat across from each other in some soft-lit restaurant. To glimpse him outdoors, in the unmerciful noonlight of this sweltering September day, is to behold quite another figure: He’s a cumbersome pale near-elderly giant tortoise of a man sweating profusely into the shell of his too-tight bottle-green polo shirt. Conrad looks querulous, and overburdened, and faintly befuddled.

“I feel fine,” I tell him. “Maybe Miami agrees with me.”

“Or maybe it’s your new line of work.”

“New line of work?”

“So I gather. My sources tell me you’re no longer at Gribben Brothers.”

His sources? It can only be Sally . . .

The glass door of the hardware store leaps open when Conrad’s mammoth body lumbers onto the entrance mat. If it hadn’t, presumably he would have marched right through it; the old wrestler isn’t to be messed with this afternoon.

Immediately, a wave of refrigerated air hits us, and with it a new line of discussion. Conrad doesn’t seem to recall leaving any conversation dangling, and he starts in anew, energetically: “Tell you something? They’re all crooks in this place. Do me a favor, Luke? Do a little shoplifting. I’ll make some distraction, you shove an air conditioner into your pants. Serve them right, last time I’m here the cashier tries telling me I gave him a ten. I say it was a twenty, and I say he was a thieving bastard.”

“Maybe it was an honest mistake.”

“Maybe I’m a giant tea biscuit? Contact paper, where the hell’s the contact paper?” This concluding question is barked at a young man in a Jerry Garcia T-shirt who clearly doesn’t work here and furthermore, even if he did, surely couldn’t help us; he has the puffy-eyed, indrawn look of someone so high he can’t tell up from down.

And so it goes . . . Conrad’s performance in the hardware store might be comical, I guess, if presented as some sort of film sketch. But as experienced firsthand, up close—as his companion—it’s pretty horrifying. When the kid in the Jerry Garcia T-shirt tardily shrugs his shoulders, Conrad purses his lips and releases a flabby, flatulent splutter and swings around so grandly that he jostles an elderly gentleman who—holding up three long black screws to the light—is engaged in a painstaking series of comparisons. Conrad doesn’t excuse himself, nor does he excuse himself when he bumps into a young father cautiously wheeling a baby stroller. And when, after a good deal of circular wandering, he locates the contact paper and a clerk willing to assist him, he says, “Christ, is this all the choice there is?” so witheringly that the clerk beats a retreat. Unassisted, Conrad eventually settles on the store’s least annoying contact

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