Key 17

Upon acquisition of his new Plymouth, and with the last bite of his tuna fish sandwich securely in his mouth, Daryl slid the one hundredth key onto his big brass ring. He had completed his metal prize, a fine conglomeration hanging from his belt loop. "I've done it," he told the boys at the plant, holding aloft the set by his shiny ignition key. "Here is my milestone, this baby right here."


The key itself, for Daryl, took on more significance than his new twelve-thousand dollar car sitting in the lot. He slid the shiny key onto a separate yellow clip marked off on the ring, the place where he kept his "active" ones. They numbered eleven when he took the old Jeep key and slid it down to "inactive."


"Tell us about seventeen today," Danny yelled from behind the lathe, smiling across the long, noisy space under layers of perspiration. "I like the number seventeen today."


"Yeah, I'll go with that," called Sparky, and he fired up another butt by the office door. "Get us a good one ready, Daryl."


Daryl slid along the wall until he came to his station behind the press, well accustomed to the jingle from his heavy hip as he walked.


At the end of lunch hour each afternoon, Daryl would select a key from his vast collection. He'd sit at the middle of the long table at the back of the cafeteria where the skylight filtered down. Danny and Bernard would flank him, surrounded by Sparky and his younger brother and seven or eight of the older workers. After the assembled had finished rustling in their chairs, he'd raise the selected key above them, like a priest offering a chalice.


Every day it would be a different key, a different story, such as key 43, and the story of his Chevy Malibu with the sawed-off roof and the ironing board mounted in the backseat as a pseudo-surfboard, six friends squeezed in screaming Beach Boys lyrics all the while into passing cars on their way to the lake, and then opening up their ironing board in the chest-deep water to ride in the imaginary waves; or key 72, to the Volkswagen that he'd abandoned on a one-lane bridge after polishing off a fifth of Southern Comfort, diving into the shallow stream in an attempt to sober up and falling asleep on what he thought was a boulder but turned out to be a large snapping turtle that took the lobe of his ear off; or key 12, with the fiery, deliberate destruction of his Pinto on the interstate, and a subsequent chase through the cold black woods by two policewoman, one of which turned out to be his aunt, who fired warning shots into the air, killing a large Snowy Owl which had just been tagged by the Conservation Society; or key 79, the time he watched in helpless horror through his telephoto lens from the top of the World Trade Center as his van was being dismantled by several blurry criminals, and by the time he was able to advance seventy-two floors down and fifteen blocks over to the scene, only a mangled alarm siren remained, resting atop a cinder block with a note reading 'thanks for the stuff'. There, of course, were the non-car related keys, such as Key 88, to the deadbolt that was removed by his landlord while Daryl was away in Europe for a month because he had left raw chicken in the garbage, and the ensuing smell led everyone to believe he had been murdered and his body left to decompose and just when everyone had begun to breathe easier they had found the decomposed Lutz kid behind the stairs of the laundry room; or Key 7, to the apartment he had desecrated by painting the walls and ceiling flat black, even dying the carpet black, and painting fluorescent stars and planets all around, having friends over to smoke pot and drop acid and pretend they were the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, until they were surprised and arrested one night by a Sergeant J. Kirk and a partner with long eyebrows.


Of course, each episode was stretched out to accommodate the waning moments of the lunch hour. All of Daryl's stories were spiced-up truths flavored into elaborate little fictions. If he found himself stuck at some point where he figured the story wasn't quite long or entertaining enough, he'd simply add something new into the pot.


His audience certainly didn't mind. Bernard and Sparky subsisted in pools of gullibility, sitting quiet and amazed. They worshiped Daryl's life. And while Danny knew them to be fabrication, he nonetheless enjoyed Daryl's fertile imagination and egged him into more and more untruths, never questioning why or where or how they had been borne.


Today, Danny had selected seventeen. Daryl sifted through his conglomeration, counting along in little whispers from the edge of his active keys until he reached the seventeenth. He slid out a small brass-plated key with two notches, tarnished from years of non-use. He pushed it out with his thumb, acting puzzled by its presence on the ring. It had some vague familiarity about it, yet he could not elicit even a fragment of a memory. What was it to? Certainly not to a car or a door. The key obviously fit something small, something uncommon. It had to be near ten years ago, he figured, back in that one stretch that he accumulated the bulk of his collection, back when everything swarmed together into a nestful of pleasant memories.


"That's odd," he muttered.


"Say what," said Sparky. "Speak up."


"You know, I can't remember what this belongs to...isn't that odd? I thought I knew every one of these." He paused and slid his fingers around the edges, hoping perhaps something would come to him. "Sorry, guys," he said. "Seventeen's out...I'm drawing a blank here...how about another?" Sparky went on to select 33, at which point Daryl told the tale of his post-office box when he lived out on the farm, and how he had started a mail-order business selling soft pretzels to displaced Philadelphians living in California. The complaint letters about stale pretzels came piling in, and then the FDA started investigating because it was apparently illegal to send food through the mail. Meanwhile, some woman named Beatrice L. from Modesto had gotten a stale nub lodged in her esophagus and had choked to death, after which her husband, possessed by fury and an innate hatred of Easterners, drove three thousand miles in an old black Rambler to hunt Daryl down with his Winchester. Daryl went on to describe in fine detail the kicking down of his door, the shotgun blast through the middle of his sofa, and his subsequent leap from the porch and long, panic-driven sprint into the woods.


"Didn't go back for days," Daryl said. "I imagined this guy sleeping in my bed, cradling his gun and waiting for my return. I didn't want to call the cops because the FDA guys would trace me....so I took a couple of my buddies, Bruce and Dave, back to kick his ass, but he was gone."


Daryl had timed the story so lunch hour would end just at that point. He was already thinking about how to embellish it the next time out. Maybe Bruce would get it in the arm with a slug, or maybe the guy would steal his album collection.


He left the lunchroom, quietly relieved they had not caught on, grateful they had not prodded him about key 17. He would have had to tell them there was nothing worth telling, and then they might have questioned its presence on the ring. "If it's not worth telling about, you get rid of it," someone might have called out, mimicking his own words.


Daryl thought about removing the key from his ring. After all, it was only an unworkable key to an old foot locker stuffed with a bunch of winter clothes. The only point to keeping it was to have that hundred.


At bedtime, he rested the keys on his nightstand next to the empty glass and thought about what he could buy that locks, something that would replace key 17, something that would someday have a story behind it.


Daryl awoke near 4 a.m., and it must have been some dream because usually he slept right through. Fleeting images rose away from him, like smoke on distant hills, into forgetfulness. He listened to the grinding motor of a garbage truck several blocks over, and he thought about his mother buried down at Lawnbrook. He wondered what the headstone looked like. Dis Sis bring fresh irises this week? Had she stayed another hot Sunday afternoon and sung another Billy Holiday tune at the burned grass? Daryl wondered for some reason if the phone would ring.


He laid awake and he remembered that morning they cleared his mother's row home out, when he stood over the bathtub wondering how dirty it must have been for her to scrub hard enough to have had a heart attack. His sister Ruth was taking the good things, which didn't bother him because it was just antique mirrors and mahogany end tables. He just took the foot locker from the attic which Ruth said she'd emptied out, except she hadn't, because when Daryl had lugged it up the stairs and through his apartment door and opened it, he had found a little package of old photographs stuffed into a side pocket. And he remembered the one on top, the one at the beach: the gray afternoon sky under which his mother was holding his hands as his feet touched the water and Daryl's baby eyes were watching the little waves bubbling around his ankles as she looked away from the camera. Some strands of her hair had blown back across one of her eyes. He remembered with haunting clarity his tiny little hands engulfed in hers, inescapable. The black Atlantic filled the background, and his mother's bare eye probably caught a storm blowing in, and there wasn't much time.


The last thing he said to her was shut the hell up. He'd shoved her hard enough during the argument that she lost her balance and fell back against the tea table and broke some porcelain saucers on the floor and left a soggy tea bag dangling by its tag on the edge of the tray. He couldn't quite remember, but he thought she must have been accusing him of lying all the time and that translated to "your life is really nothing at all like you lead people to believe, and eventually all that bullshitting will catch up with you." He remembered feeling right then as if the cover had been lifted from his secret-- his mother had let the light come pouring in, exposing his flaw beneath a fold of untruths. No wonder his rage precipitated the shove. He remembered thinking it wasn't so much the force of the shove but its unexpectedness. He didn't calculate the precariousness of her high-heeled shoes during such a physical encounter, nor the chain reaction that knocked her buttocks against the tray, shattering the china on her hardwood floor. All of these events served to magnify his harmless push, igniting a spark within his mother that would signal her perpetual silence towards him. "I have nothing left to say to you," she said. "Not for the rest of my life will I have anything to say." Daryl remembered her voice was calm, a frightening calm of conviction that brought back the memory of some frozen moment earlier in his youth when he had done something dreadfully wrong and he was awaiting the rise of her voice that never came. Instead, a punishment lingered like the slow torture that wielded itself in her calm demeanor and brought the sentence of no television for a month down upon him. He connected that event to this one, and he knew immediately that there was no hope of her ever speaking to him again.

He watched her bend over to pick up the broken pieces of china, watched her as she crawled beneath the sofa for a shard, before he could react in apology. But the apology was only a weak stammer of "I didn't mean for that to happen" followed by a nimble attempt to help her with the broken dishes. Daryl knew this was his last best attempt to make contact and correct his action. But the overwhelming power of her silent conviction, reflected in the chiseled stone of her face, paralyzed him into intimidation.


Daryl eventually gave up on the phone calls, gave up trying so valiantly to apologize before she hung up. He'd sent card after card, ones showing water lilies and clowns and boats off to sea, with folded letters begging her forgiveness, written in his best penmanship. Sis had tried to mediate their feud in the ensuing years, hand delivering roses with her promise that Daryl is really sorry and wants to talk to you again. But like Daryl, Sis exhausted herself trying, upon which Daryl surrendered hope and conceded a lifelong silence with his mother.


It must have been the dream, for the images came back with the brilliance of headlights upon the curtain as he lay there in the night. He remembered looking down into the casket at her purple, swollen eyelids and the lips sealed tight against her aged face. It was the first time he had really looked at her in years up close, and he noticed how quickly the flesh had sagged and how considerably her hair had thinned, whitened and almost phosphorescent against the dark silk interior of her coffin. Her body did not move him to tears; rather, her dead presence became simply another uncomfortable silent encounter.


The garbage truck moved closer. He remembered her before the silence, back to when he was ten. She would stand on the back step and watch him play with his toys in the dirt. She watched as he lined his army men along the tree root, always reminding him the Germans had to lose. On the day his hamster Elvis died among the cedar chips, she made him turn his eyes from the cold stiff fur to tell him that everything was O.K. because rodents had no souls. He remembered lying beneath the blanket with her there on the couch and falling asleep to the news in the dim blue light, feeling her warm breath and listening to her whispers of love, telling him to close his eyes because there was nothing left to see until the morning.


The key on that ring was not so useless after all; it was a secret little key that unlocked somber doors to his past, flashing gray truths out of yesterdays he could simply close away with the touch of another key and its story. The secrets that locker key held could never be told, especially to the boys in the lunchroom.


Daryl could not return to sleep and he watched as the light siphoned the darkness from his curtains. He listened as the cars started up for their morning drives. Before he left for work himself, Daryl left a message on Sis's machine that he'd go up with her to Lawnbrook the next time out. He considered what type of flowers for the grave.

"Sixty-four" came the voice as his punch card clicked down. "That's the number, Daryl." After his tuna, he counted along the ring. He was certain of sixty-four, for he had told it several times. It was the old rabbit hutch key.


"Now I used to have this big rabbit hutch I'd built with my dad out in the yard," he began. "Now this hutch was rather large by rabbit standards, measuring...oh, eight feet long and four feet wide surrounded by two layers of chicken wire stapled to the two by fours with a little door at the top with a padlock." Daryl held up the key.


"Really, guys, this was no hutch for rabbits....you see, it was really built for a reticulated python, a seven-footer I'd saved my paper route money to buy off the kid across the creek. Cost me fifty bucks."


Daryl sighed and his mind searched for direction as he looked down the table with all the eyes upon him. "What, may you ask, does a reticulated python eat? Well, Carl and I used to go down to the American Cancer Society laboratory and buy white mice for a quarter apiece, except you had to buy a minimum of thirty...so we'd scrape our cash together and bring a crate of the things home. Now seeing as how we couldn't afford to feed this shitload of mice and seeing as how pythons didn't need to eat their food live..well... me and Carl would sit ourselves down at the kitchen table and proceed to snap all of their little necks clean." Daryl gestured with a flinch of his hands. "Then we'd get some baggies and wrap each one individually and freeze em' up. I'd thaw out a week's supply and, boom, everybody was happy...me, Carl, and Serp...that was the snake's name." Daryl paused and reflected. "Course, come to think of it, the mice weren't too happy...but then again, mice don't have feelings." "Now there came a time when the python started getting pretty big. It had gotten to nine feet by the end of that first summer, and by the end of three summers it was near twenty. Now I was going through guinea pigs instead of mice and my funds had run dry. Mom and Dad insisted it was time to give old Serp up to the zoo, but it wasn't that easy. You see, guys, I had become something of a hot-shot around the neighborhood. I was "The Dude with the Giant Snake." To take that away, it would have been like removing a vital organ. But dad didn't see it that way, and he called the zoo one evening and he told me they were coming out the next morning to pick it up."


Daryl left a few seconds of silence dangle just then, like a piece of bacon on a fishhook. "They come out? They take Serp away?" came the bites.


"Well, a funny thing happened that night, something you might call fate. You see, this particular rabbit hutch had begun to rot in the legs from sitting in the rain, because dad hadn't bothered to get pressure-treated lumber. It happened that on that very night one of the legs gave way to the weight of that monster snake and the hutch came crashing down in the yard while all were asleep. Now while dad had this little pride thing about his carpenter skills, they didn't show too well with this particular hutch...he should have used longer nails in the two by fours, for upon impact to the ground, the thing literally broke apart and...guess what....the snake slithered away into the night."


"The zoo guy they sent over seemed real alarmed when I told him Serp was twenty-one feet long and a good foot in diameter. He called for helpers and they scoured the neighborhood eight hours a day for over two weeks. The kid across the creek that sold me the snake, Eddie was his name, Eddie Shemanski... it turns out that at this particular time his three-year-old kid sister is mysteriously missing, and of course everyone does the old conclusion-jumping and thinks you-know-who ate her. The zoo guy goes wacko, running around saying 'sweet Jesus' and making little signs of the cross and nobody knows what to do except to keep on searching."


"Meanwhile, Eddie's mother comes storming over to the house red-faced and crying all over our carpet screaming she's going to put me away in a jail cell if they find my snake and cut it open and find her little baby girl all purple and dead. 'And even if she's not dead', she says right to me with her bony finger out 'tell me how that little girl will be able to live a normal life after being inside a snake. She'll have nightmares until she's eighty, nightmares every night of being swallowed whole.'"


Daryl looked up at the clock, and it told him lunchtime was up. "Oops, back to the lathe, boys," he said, pushing out his chair and rising with his tray.


"Awwww, come on," came the collective reply.


"Yeah! Tell us, did it eat the girl,?" Danny asked.


Daryl stopped for a minute over the trash can and as he dumped: "No, as it turned out...the estranged husband Mr. Shemanski snatched the little tyke from the lawn right out of her rubber pool, then brought her back when he read of the mass hysteria in the paper. Seems a guilty conscience got him."


"Well what of the snake Daryl, what of the snake?" Sparky called.


"Next time," Daryl replied, donning his goggles.


Daryl grinded away the screws one after the other out of the boring pin and slid them into the slots along the box. He stacked them on the shelf the way he always did, one after the other in even rows of ten, and then down to the next shelf. Out from the noise of the lathe flickered a distant memory: the garter snake his mother didn't want him to have, the one he kept in the terrarium at the back of the garage. He pleaded with her to bring it into the house when the weather got cold, and she finally submitted and let him take it to his room. It was just another real truth buried beneath the stories of key sixty-four, just a lock on a five-gallon terrarium for a skinny garter snake.


Beneath the sound of the chiseling metal, Daryl could feel the weight of every key pulling at his belt as he swung. His realization came: all of his keys were tainted by hidden truths, truths severed long ago from memory by his elaborate exaggerations. They were truths as gray and dismal as his very life, constant and predictable as the motor of the lathe, turning and grinding, turning and grinding, day after month after year. They were only the stark and depressing realities of a convertible that never ran and a Volkswagen that lost its transmission and the Pinto that ran out of gas and the van that had some tapes stolen from it and all of the apartment keys he'd made copies of that nothing ever happened in and the mailbox in which nothing ever arrived.


Daryl finished late today, later than most of his days, for the gauging unit hadn't been properly recalibrated and he had to stop and do it himself. He had gone into overtime so he had better watch it, lest Boss Holyoke lecture him again. He expedited the last set and labeled the date to the side, then cut off the lathe and punched out.


Worn down and alone in the lunchroom, Daryl finished a juice and rested his conglomeration of one hundred keys upon the table. It always felt good to remove them at the end of long days like this one. There came a renewed lightness to his hip, a freedom almost.


Daryl thought about the garter snake again, about the fear the thing instilled in his mother as she walked cautiously past his bedroom, the frightful dreams she'd have of it crawling up her sheets in the dark. She'd sacrificed her fear of snakes for him, lived with the nightmares just to allow him his pet. She let him keep a snake in his room: wasn't that a true sign of a mother's love?


Now she was long dead, buried over in Lawnbrook with nothing left to fear, nothing left to say. His revelation had come too late. Daryl felt again the invisible hands of his mother engulfing his. He sat in the silence of the lunchroom for some time, thinking about the forthcoming trip to her grave, knowing almost for certain he would break down and cry there. Already, he could feel the tight pains that accompany grief begin to rise from his chest as his throat tightened and the tears welled up about his eyes. No, he thought, he can't cry in the middle of an empty lunchroom. It just wasn't the place. The room had begun to gray as a mass of storm clouds came rolling in from over the quarry. He could hear the thunder advancing as he watched the reflections from his key chain fall into the dying light. The rain was going to come soon, and Daryl thought he'd better get up and get out to his new Plymouth and go home, because there wasn't much time.

---

Return to CONTENTS