Caregivers, fiction by Jeff Esterholm
It never failed. Alex Ingram would approach the checkout counter at the downtown King Drug—it didn’t matter what he was buying, it could have been a birthday card, a newspaper, a Snickers picked up at the register—and there, just ahead of him, would be a senior citizen, on their own or with a husband, wife, or friend. This snowy early spring day was no exception.
This one, solo and full-bore into her eighties, a dusty burgundy wig slipped forward, to starboard from Ingram’s perspective, was making an additional purchase besides the items in her cart, the holiday-decorated tin of remaindered hard Christmas candy and a cellophane packet of black support hose. “I’ll take five of them scratch cards,” she said, pointing at the scuffed fiberglass lockbox. “And one of those, just one. For the $100,000 prize.”
The cashier pulled the cards, rang them up, told the elderly woman the cost.
Burgundy Wave—the name Ingram christened her with while he waited, leaning against the counter—her face pulsed through pale pancake makeup, radiating a shade similar to the wig. Something in her age-eroded profile was familiar, though slippery and vague. A first-grade teacher he’d thought long deceased? The gruff, cigarette-smoking transplant from Oklahoma who ran the corner grocery when he was a kid? “What do you mean? How can that be?” The price quoted was less than she expected. She was sure that she owed more than what the cashier asked for.
All Ingram wanted was to be on his way after paying for what his old man had sent him to buy: the bottle of over-the-counter testosterone booster. The old man swore by the tablets. Whatever. Ingram tried not to stare at Burgundy Wave.
After the back and forth over the price charged to gamble in the state lottery system, the scratch cards and the potential $100,000 winner, Burgundy Wave finally turned away from the harried clerk, muttered about her favorite cashier not being at work, and, before exiting via the pharmacy’s automatic sliding door, gave Ingram a side-eye that, if it could have killed, would have laid him out, flattened on the King Drug floor and blocking the cosmetics aisle.
The look read as, “I know you. I know your family, back to your grandma and grandpa and before them. And after them. Your father and all of his brothers and sisters. And you’re probably just like your father. I know you.” Ingram didn’t doubt that she knew. He’d been thrown by the dusty burgundy wig up to that point, but now he was sure: he knew her too. It was her. Eva Quelch.
Ingram hung back by the King Drug entrance and watched where Eva Quelch was going. He buttoned his coat, turned up the collar. She glanced back twice, a gloved hand planted on top of her wig. It was a windy day, the heavy snow, wet and sticking, falling and then lifting with an acrobatic twist in the gusts blowing out of the north, off Lake Superior. Eva Quelch, dammit, Ingram thought. She knew she was being watched. She made for a filthy Ford F-150, likely silver on the day of purchase.
Ingram began walking from the pharmacy when Eva Quelch climbed in at the passenger side of the idling Ford, exhaust flowing from beneath its covered bed. After she pulled her door shut there was a pause before the truck took a right and pulled up alongside Ingram, the driver’s window sliding open, the engine rumbling. Ingram stood, squinting through the snow, and thought, Old Home Week.
The driver of the Ford was Verne Quelch. Old Verne, with the same cemetery gray eyes. Thick wavy hair gone from red to a dull yellow, Quelch’s face was like the tooled leather of a vintage purse, something Ingram’s mother or a country singer like Patsy Cline would have carried over her shoulder. Even when Ingram was a kid, running around North End, he imagined those swirls in Verne Quelch’s face.
The surprise was Verne breaking out a smile for the young man standing in the snow. He had a new set of bright white choppers that gleamed. “You look like your old man forty, fifty years ago,” Verne said, laughing.
Ingram heard Eva’s voice rasping away inside the pickup: “I told you who it was. I told you.”
“How’s your old man doing?” Verne asked, while looking like he wanted to be asked about his dentures, praised about them, how young they made his mouth look, if nothing else.
“He’s doing fine,” Ingram said. His old man was diagnosed that past winter, low scores on the BIMS and MoCA tests, though Ingram didn’t see any of the signs. Perhaps he was around him too often to notice, he didn’t know. But he wasn’t about to share that nugget regarding his old man with Verne and Eva Quelch.
“That’s good, that’s good,” Verne hummed, revving the pickup’s engine. “Which one are you anyway, which Ingram? The baby of Joe’s family?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Alex.”
Eva’s voice again, as sure as the look she shot him in the drugstore: “Little Alex, huh? He looks so much like him. Like his dad.”
“Most definitely,” Verne said. “Say, why don’t you bring Joe out for a visit sometime. Or, hell, tell him to drive out. We still live above the old tavern. Near Port Nicollet. You remember that, don’t you? Outside of town, across from where the Sunset Drive-In used to be? Sure. Tell him to drop by. He’ll know.”
Ingram gave Verne Quelch a thumbs-up, but he didn’t believe he and his father, or his father alone, would ever drive out that way. It seemed like Verne Quelch was toying with him: We know. We know your old man is teetering on the brink.
A plastic-bladed shovel leaned next to the door. Someone had etched a sloppy path to the cracked public sidewalk. Laraine Waseleski most likely had not dug her way through the snow, up to Joe Ingram’s door. She had other forms of entry and egress. Laraine was Joe’s girlfriend and neighbor, living a few doors north in this complex the city called Section 8 housing. The housing project was on the city’s northside, a poor yet proud residential neighborhood hemmed in by Lake Superior, a shipyard looking for purpose, and west- and eastbound railroad tracks. When Alex Ingram was a kid, up through his college years, the identical apartments were housing for low-income single parents, one of whom he dated for a time. He hadn’t been the most admirable of twenty-year-olds, but at least he hadn’t been the married cop who was a horndog for the young woman named Melly. Officer Piccolo: not a good man.
Melly, Alex’s sometimes girlfriend, had some interesting stories about Piccolo, sure, but also about the North End project, about how the attics of each apartment were one, interconnected. You could travel from one end of the complex to the other via the long attic space. Melly said you didn’t want to store anything you valued up there because it was sure to disappear. Not much in the way of her worldly goods were ever stolen. Officer Piccolo was an abiding, protective presence. The last Alex heard, Melly had married a retired Great Lakes seaman and moved out to Hayward, Wisconsin, where the couple operated a supper club. Officer Piccolo was on his third or fourth wife, his pension burned away each month via orders from Family Court. Anyway, that was one Piccolo story. Alex didn’t know what Piccolo played at these days. Maybe he was dead.
Now, Alex’s father was a resident here, what the old man called the Compound.
When Joe Ingram moved into the Compound, Alex stole a moment from shifting boxes out of the U-Haul to slide the stairs from the apartment’s attic ceiling hatch. He looked in. Left and right, the space appeared to go on forever. The attic was how Laraine Waseleski made her way over to Joe’s place on rainy summer evenings and snowy spring afternoons.
From outside the front door, Alex could hear Sinatra singing. Frank. The stylus would drop into a Nancy track soon enough. Laraine having sluiced over to Joe’s via Attic Way, the couple spent their time playing selections by the Sinatras over coffee and some treat, brownies, cake, doughnuts, debating who was the better singer, father or daughter. “You Only Live Twice” brought down the house every time, Joe Ingram conceding. “Yes,” Nancy was tops.
As Alex walked in, Laraine torched, “One for yourself and one for your dreams.” He glanced around and dropped the pharmacy bag in his father’s lap. On the floor in front of Joe’s straight out of the seventies stereo console was a semicircle of album sleeves from the last century, LPs atop their mates.
“Alex! Hello, hello,” Laraine warbled, lifting the tonearm from the spinning LP.
Joe Ingram slipped the black plastic bottle from the King Drug bag, smiled, nodded at Alex, then grunted to his feet and shuffled into the kitchenette. His credo: It is my right as a senior citizen to grunt and shuffle. He had earned it. And from Laraine, Alex once overheard her tell a friend that the old man at eighty-three was better in the sack than many of the forty-year-olds she had known. At fifty-eight, Alex rolled his eyes. He and Laraine had graduated from high school together.
Alex helped her pick up the recorded history of Sinatra, father and daughter, and reshelve them. He fought the urge to arrange the records in order of release date. When he turned around, Joe was back in his easy chair, Laraine sitting next to him on the arm, both sipping from mugs she’d fashioned in a ceramics class.
After throwing his jacket over the back of the sofa, Alex sat and warily came out with his news. “I saw Eva and Verne at King Drug.” His old man never had a good word for that clan. That’s what Joe called them, the Quelch Clan, what he couldn’t stand about them. But Alex watched him now. Did Joe recall Eva and Verne?
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Yes. Joe Ingram remembered the Quelches. “Have they moved back to town? To the Compound? Is the rest of the clan with them?” Joe feigned dread, glancing over his shoulders, unbending himself from the chair to peek out the front window. “You know, they all moved to Florida when Verne and Eva took off.”
“No. Verne and Eva are still out by Port Nicollet.”
Laraine rubbed Joe’s shoulders. Alex didn’t know if she’d ever heard of the couple.
Something about the Quelches, something more than the entire family decamping for greener pastures every few years, that clannishness, something else about Eva and Verne always twisted Joe’s nut. It had been so since Alex was a kid. Now, Joe reconsidered them, then said, “Both of them older than me, I would’ve expected they’d be dead by now, planted in one of our fine cemeteries.” There was disappointment in his voice. And something more.
Joe said it must be close to midnight and then surprised himself, looking at the time on the microwave oven clock. It was ten o’clock, just after. The three of them sat at the small kitchen table that evening drinking decaf. Joe did the talking. Most of it.
“Here’s how it was when I was a kid,” he said, looking at Alex, wanting to look him into understanding what happened all those years ago. “I was a lowlife, a North End hood.” His right hand ticked metronomically, palm down. “A little of this, a little of that. When I was laid off”—a light chop to the tabletop for emphasis—“only then.”
Laraine gave Joe’s hand a squeeze. It was news to Alex.
“Verne and Eva approached me at a neighborhood house party. At the Backlunds? The Paulsons? Funny, I don’t recall whose place it was at. Could’ve been ours or even theirs. Anyway. Verne and me, we’d known each other for years. Eva. Before your mom, Eva and me, we”—Joe air quoted—“dated.”
He allowed Laraine and Alex the minute or two they might need to think that one over. “Anyway, they approached me. They had that tavern, out in the county. On the south shore. Big ideas about vending machines? Oh, you bet they did.”
“Vending machines?” Alex asked. Big ideas? Cigarette machines and jukeboxes didn’t snap together in his mind as pieces of any big idea.
“Yes. They had this, whaddya call it, a business plan. Frankly, it was some seat of your pants operation about taking over the vending machine business up north here, covering all the taverns, as many as they could pull in.”
It sounded penny ante to Alex. “Taking over from who?” Laraine looked at him, like, let your father talk.
“The mob.” The three of them traded looks, Laraine and Alex skeptical. Even Joe Ingram, the teller of the tale, did not appear totally convinced.
Alex and Laraine, neither of them, living all the way up in the Northland, had ever heard of the mob in—
“Wait. Where? In Milwaukee?” Alex asked.
Joe nodded, told them about the Milwaukee boss, at least what he’d heard about him way back when. Mr. Big. Dead now. The unsolved murder of a jukebox operator in Kenosha County. He couldn’t remember his name. News barely made it up north. The man found trouble by, who knows, getting too big. “It makes a person wonder,” said Joe.
He sipped at his cup of lukewarm coffee. “That’s the world Verne and Eva wanted to take on, invited me into.” He shook his head. “Not nice people. Then again, no one held a gun to my head. I joined them, in a manner of speaking.”
To Alex, the story had the feel of a Coen brothers movie. He smiled. “So, you decided to take on Johnny Caspar?” He laughed, excused himself.
“What? You fart?” his father asked. “No, no. I know it sounds cracked. I was the money guy.”
“You?”
“Yes. I had a couple thousand. Okay. Five thousand.”
Alex whistled. Laraine clapped her hands, said, “Oh, baby.”
“I invested, but—pfft—never saw any of that money again. Not a dime. Verne and Eva? There was trouble, I heard there was anyway. And they shoved off to, I dunno, somewhere. Canada. Florida.”
“That’s why,” Alex said.
“Not one thin dime,” Laraine repeated.
Joe Ingram’s lips tightened, and that was that.
Laraine crawled through the ceiling, had to babysit her granddaughter later that morning, a few hours away. She gave her beau a hug, said goodnight to Alex.
Stairs up, the attic hatch slapped shut. Joe looked on as Alex prepared to leave. The thin line of his mouth broke open, closed again.
His old man phoned Monday, early evening, skipping past hello, how are you. “Do you have any idea how much five grand from the late sixties would be in today’s dollars?” He didn’t wait for Alex to respond, which Alex thought fine, not having a head for that sort of thing, the dollar’s value over time. Joe let him know: “Upwards of, get this: Forty. Thousand. Dollars.”
“Okay.” Alex waited, wondering where his father was headed with this.
“Eva and Verne. They can easily give me what’s mine, in today’s dollars. Now.” Joe sputtered. “Or soon. Later this week.”
“Dad—”
“They won that hundred grand jackpot, just the other night.” The old man laughed, so bitter, so sweet. “They interviewed them on that afternoon show on channel ten. You know, before the news.”
Alex felt the surprise, the excitement for, who? Eva? He’d watched her purchase, head topped by that cockeyed burgundy wig, the ticket. The winning ticket. “Good for them,” he said. “I guess, anyway. People like Eva and Verne certainly are the lucky ones.”
He could hear his father breathing, heavily.
“I want what is mine.”
Alex put off running over to Joe’s place. Not even for his regular drop-in, see, like a good, caregiving son, how life at the Compound was going. Laraine could handle that. Sure. Alex didn’t want to deal with the Quelch money issue. I want what is mine.
He stayed away until he couldn’t help himself. Until the shove of only-child guilt finally pushed him out the door. He thought, What if Joe decides to drive out to Port Nicollet on his own? What if Laraine, in her love for the old man, whatever the hell it was, or with that dollar sign charm of tens of thousands—she wasn’t like that, was she?—what if she encouraged Joe to drive out to that rural county tavern and demand the Quelches pay him his share. What if? What would they do?
His dad. Verne. Eva. They all were as old as fuck.
When Alex pulled up to the Compound, Laraine was outside Joe’s front door, sitting on a lawn chair that had sunk into the melting snow next to the stoop, chain-smoking her Merit cigarettes.
“Thank God you finally showed up.” No hello, no smile. Lighting her next smoke, the last in the pack apparently. She tore it open to be sure. “Goddammit.”
Alex started off light. “What’s the good word, Laraine?”
“Joe is inside with tight leather gloves on, smacking his right fist into his left palm. Does that give you a clue? He wants what’s his. Of course, you’ve known that for some time now. Other than that, it might get up to sixty-three today. The sun’s out. And your father hasn’t beaten up any senior citizen tavern owners. Yet.” She balled up the empty cigarette pack. “I’m out of these, and that’s a pisser.”
“Good, good. You’re here.” Joe was on Alex when he stepped through the door, his son an imagined life buoy on the stormy lake. He clasped his shoulders with his gloved hands. “We’ve got to get out to their bar. Eva and Verne’s. But, where’s my rifle? The Remington 14? I’ve been tearing the place apart looking for it.”
Get out to their bar. Alex could still hear it. He eyed the apartment, stalling. No one had tossed the place. Get out to their bar? He finally said, “The rifle’s in the trunk.”
“Great thinking!” Joe gave him a hallelujah shake. The Remington Model 14, passed down to him from his father in the early fifties, was Joe’s deer hunting rifle of choice.
Alex nodded, looking away from his father, gazing off at anything other than the old man’s cheered but distant eyes, thinking to say something. “Why don’t you go grab your windbreaker. We’ll get going.”
There was one hang up before they could pull away from the Compound. Laraine trudged to her apartment through the melting snow. It was the first time Alex had seen her go in and come out her own door. Maybe she went to see if there was that elusive last pack of Merits tucked away somewhere. Hidden in a tea canister, away from her grandchildren. Maybe. Who knew.
Joe muttered in the backseat of Alex’s Saturn Ion. It sounded as though the old man was planning a mission as consequential as the Normandy invasion. Laraine, she came back, a hand clasping the purse to her body, as if the imitation leather bag would fly away if she didn’t hold it close. She climbed in alongside Alex. And they were off.
Verne’s name wasn’t in the swirl of neon stretched out over the tavern’s front door and ad-plastered windows. An artist’s caricature of a younger Eva on a chaise longue, a panetella in her hand, was painted below the neon. To Alex, she looked like Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar. If it had been nighttime, the electrified glass tubing would have lit the parking lot, touched the county highway that slipped by, pink and green, like his favorite ice cream, peppermint krisp. The neon spelled out Eva’s Lounge. As it was, in daylight, the tavern’s sign turned off, the glass tubing was gray with dirt and touched with dusty cobwebs. Across the road sat the shuttered Sunset Drive-In. Sorry trees and something like midwestern tumbleweed, no other way to describe it, struggled to stunted maturity amid the regimented speaker stands.
Alex followed Joe and Laraine as they walked, all in high dudgeon, into Eva’s Lounge. Both of them, like they were owed the world and more. He thought, well, maybe his old man is right to be so purposeful, but Laraine?
He hung back, scoping out the situation: a deep, dark tavern with no customers, a bartender washing glasses, occasionally glancing up at the only light offered, a late-in-the-afternoon soap opera on the television, high up in a corner above the bar. It was no sports pub. There had been a recent celebration. A CONGRATULATIONS banner suspended from the ceiling, over the bar where the bartender scrubbed, but it looked more appropriate for a wedding reception or a baby shower in a church basement. Hell, even a funeral. Maybe not “congratulations” in that instance, Alex reasoned.
He studied the bartender when he turned away from the TV and looked over at the Ingram crew. “Shit,” Alex said softly. The man’s head seemed wider somehow, puffier than Alex remembered. His torso hanging fuller, like a giant Bartlett pear. Alex hadn’t seen him in years. He was the retired cop. Piccolo. And he didn’t appear to particularly care for folks approaching the bar with an attitude.
Piccolo swiped at the bar top with a dingy white towel, then stowed it, kept his hand below the drip edge. Before Piccolo could say a word—Hello or Who the hell or Okay, you turn right around and—Joe asked, “Where are they? Verne. Eva. Where?”
“Let’s start over, sir.” The former cop began, attempting to deescalate whatever was transpiring with the basso hum of a Lutheran pastor. “Would you tell me who you are?”
Alex spotted Eva and Verne appear from a back hall.
“Jesus Christ and Mary,” Verne roared. “It’s Joe Ingram and his kid. Will you look at that, Eva? And a young lady with them too. I told you they’d drive out this way.” He walked towards Joe with a hand extended, his smile casting a brighter light than the afternoon soap in the corner of the ceiling. “How’re you doing, Joe? You look to be in fine fettle.”
Joe was flexing his hands, squeezing leather fists.
Alex said, “Dad—”
“I heard you and Eva got lucky,” from Joe, not a question. “I heard a week or so ago.”
Verne snorted out a chuckle.
“A healthy chunk of change.”
Eva grasped her husband’s elbow, tapped an adjustment to her wig. To Alex, it looked like she was trying and failing to pull him back.
“I’ve come for my share,” Joe said, popping a fist into his palm.
“Aw, Joe.”
Piccolo laid his hand on the bar. Alex glimpsed what he held there, what he tapped on the bar top. He understood: the former cop was the Quelches’ muscle. Piccolo continued to rap the black matte pistol’s barrel against the bar.
“Alex, get it out of the trunk.”
The Remington Model 14. Alex’s eyes shifted away. The rifle wasn’t in the Saturn’s trunk. It was back at Alex’s place, stowed in its old carrying case and stuffed in the back of the closet where he kept his own fall and winter gear. He had snuck the rifle out of Joe’s quarters when the old man’s assessment results came back. Alex questioned the diagnosis, but he wasn’t taking chances.
Now, his mouth hung open, empty of reply. His father didn’t look back at him, only threw off the vibe, Move.
Verne kept his lips in the semblance of a smile, a look no one would have pointed out as one. “What do you want him to get, Joe?” His leathery face nodded Piccolo’s way, an eyebrow raised, “You don’t want any trouble now, do you?”
“The Remington, Alex. Now.”
Alex was stepping up to Joe—wanting to provide his mumbled admittance: No, dad, it’s not there—when something flashed in Laraine’s hand. Brightness increased. The television screen, Verne’s teeth, and now a pistol from Laraine’s her purse. Small, shining, toylike. Something out of a black-and-white movie from the forties or fifties. Alex looked at her as if he’d just walked into the worst of bad dreams.
“Now, Alex.”
He stepped back when the shooting began. Laraine. Then Piccolo. They both fired and, less than intentionally, Laraine hit Eva. He never imagined doing such a thing, but Alex drifted forward, waving his arms like an outfielder calling for the ball. Verne fell to the floor with Eva. The burgundy wig rolled off, but not far, a sponge to the blood. Then Alex too, nearby. The last shot fired was Laraine’s, dropping Piccolo onto the bar. He slipped off to the floor behind with all the weight of his life, good and bad, there had been nothing halfway.
The dimly lit tavern had grown dimmer in the gunshot fog.
In what remained, he could hear them, their voices, the old man’s gait. It was cold on the floor.
Laraine, out of breath and dying for a cigarette, managed to speak. “We need to go, get out of here.”
“I told him to get the rifle. Now, look at him.” There was a sigh. It was so cold. “I only wanted what’s mine. Look at those two.” The toe of a boot nudged one body, then another.
“Let’s go, Joe.”
“Could you, could you just, I don’t know, empty the cash register?” The silence. Hesitation. “Something?”
There was a light tapping step across the boards to the other side of the bar. Noise in the distance. “Not much of anything here.”
“Take it. It’ll have to do. Five thousand. Forty thousand. Pennies on the dollar.” Joe Ingram spit.
The two walked out of Eva’s Lounge, leaving the four dead and dying on the cold barroom floor.
There was something like peace until Laraine ran back in. She searched Alex and roughly tugged his car keys from a pocket.
Before leaving a second time, she gave Alex a last look and said, “It’s okay. He’s got me.”
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