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  BUDDY COOPER FINDS A WAY

  Neil O’Boyle Connelly

  SIMON & SCHUSTER Rockefeller Center 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents

  either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,

  is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Neil O’Boyle Connelly

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks

  of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases,

  please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales:

  1-800-456-6798 or [email protected].

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Connelly, Neil O.

  Buddy Cooper finds a way / Neil Connelly.

  p. cm.

  1. Wrestlers—Fiction.

  2. Wrestling—Fiction.

  3. Violence—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3603.O546B83 2004

  813′.6—dc22 2004045282

  0-7432-4664-0

  ISBN - 13:978-0-7432-4664-4

  eISBN - 13:978-1-4391-3035-3

  For Beth,

  who brought back joy.

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to acknowledge the boundless love of my parents and the rest of my overgrown family, the support of my friends and colleagues, and the inspiration of writers, published and otherwise. All of you enrich my world.

  I feel particularly indebted to Warren Frazier, Adam Johnson, George Clark, Michael Horner, Tim Gautreaux, and Chris Naddeo.

  I’d also like to thank the almost innumerable wrestlers who drove my face into the mat all those years ago. If I were any good at wrestling, I doubt I would have tried writing. I appreciate the clarity.

  BUDDY

  COOPER

  FINDS A WAY

  -----

  In Which Our Hero Attempts to Return Home. Trophies and

  Medals. A Perfect Record. The Therapeutic Value of Giving Up.

  Churches Without Roofs. Wishing for a Script.

  Just as I’m nearing the turn that will lead to safety, the second moon appears before me, hung low over the Cape Fear River at the end of Market Street. I pretend I don’t see it, look left, and steer my Ford into the alley. Up ahead I can make out the yellow light on my deck, and I’m almost bold enough to hope for the impossible: Today’s plan might work. A crackling a.m. voice from WAOK reports that the evening will be clear, mild temperatures, no rain—news I instantly take as omen. This will end up as just one more fine day in a life that’s fine. On the seat next to me sits a box of Domino’s pizza and two rented videos: The Green Berets and True Grit. From here on out, the plan is simple: get up off the street, bolt the door, unplug the phone, forget the moon, and spend the night in a world where things make sense. It won’t be like last year.

  I pull to the side of the alley, kill the headlights, and turn the key, bringing silence and calm. I loop the strap of my gym bag over my shoulder and grab the pizza and flicks. From the floor I pick up the final element for tonight’s mission—a two-liter bottle of ginger ale, which doesn’t remind me at all of champagne or the tink of forks off glasses. This morning I dumped a six-pack of Bud Light into my kitchen sink, transforming my apartment into the alcohol-free zone it’s supposed to be these days.

  Taking the steps that lead up to my apartment’s deck one at a time, I envision the comfort of the brown couch, the security of the remote control in my hand. As I climb, I’m aware of the urge to turn and face downtown, peek at the second moon haunting the sky. Of course it’s not the second moon that bothers me, it’s what I can’t help picturing in its shadow: Alix, taking risks she doesn’t need to for money she already has.

  So I focus my eyes down at the faded wood of the steps that lift to the faded wood of my deck. The yellow lightbulb illuminates the Map-of-the-World welcome mat I apparently ordered from QVC in a drunken haze. $29.95 plus shipping and handling. I step up to my door, one foot in the Atlantic and one crushing China. On top of the world.

  Hugging the soda inside one arm, balancing the pizza and tapes, I dig for my keys in my pocket. Five seconds from the vault, I sense movement to my right and turn. The fact that it’s just Dr. Winston in my hammock barely registers before my eyes leap to his feet and the golden, knee-high sneakers. I drop the pizza box, which flips once and splats. John Wayne clatters to the ground.

  Dr. Winston swings free of the dirty white netting and steps into the yellow light. “Dr. Cooper,” he says. “We’d almost given you up for dead.” He shakes my hand, a practice he insists on every time we meet. His shaggy black hair, knotted with dirt, drapes his bearded face as he checks out the upside-down pizza box. I’m staring down too, but my eyes lock on the boot-length gold sneakers I haven’t seen in four years. On the sides are tiny black horns I painted myself, though now they look like little dark wings.

  “I don’t believe it,” I say.

  “Indeed. The generosity of my fellow citizens gives me great hope.” His teeth, though straight, are the color of mustard.

  “Goodwill?” I ask.

  “Second Chances,” Dr. Winston corrects me, naming the homeless shelter four blocks east. They accept donations from the public, recycle them to needy folks like Dr. Winston. I picture Trevor, climbing into the attic on Asgard Lane, ripping open the dozen cardboard boxes I double-sealed with packing tape. But this doesn’t bother me. I have the life I want.

  “Is that pepperoni?” comes down from above, and I look up into the grinning face of Dr. Gladstone, on all fours leaning over the rain gutter. He’s wearing the battered baseball cap Alix gave me when Brook was born that reads WORLD’S #1 DAD.

  “Pepperoni and sausage,” I tell him.

  Gladstone drops off the roof and studies the upside-down box, then flips it over. Melted cheese stretches from the cardboard lid. “This is completely salvageable,” he decides.

  Dr. Winston lifts his chin. “Dr. Cooper, we need your help to join the information age.”

  “We’re gonna watch TV,” Dr. Gladstone beams, peeling free a limp slice. “Remember Welcome Back, Kotter? Happy Days?”

  I step back a few feet, scan the roof for the third member of the Brain Trust. Dr. Bacchus’s rounded form leans onto my chimney, one hand gripping the 1950s-era antenna bolted to the brick. He looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy silhouetted against the deep cobalt blue of the June sky. “There’s no way this will bring in the premium porno channels,” Dr. Bacchus reports.

  Gladstone giggles nervously. All this time I’m concentrating on ignoring Winston’s boots. I focus on where I am and say, “You need more than an antenna to get a cle
ar picture.” My logic sounds like bad Bob Dylan.

  “Already taken care of,” Winston announces, bending into the darkness beneath the hammock. He stands up holding the blackand white twelve-inch Sony that Alix and I bought when she was working on her master’s thesis at UNCW. I take it from him, hold it in my hands like a sacred artifact. In the mornings before she left for class, while I spooned Brook breakfast, Alix would turn on Cardiac-Attack and kickbox aerobically. Or aerobically kickbox. I never could figure. Like the boots, like the baseball cap, this TV belongs enshrined in an attic uptown. Some nights, with Brook barely asleep in the bedroom crib, with Letterman smiling at us from this very screen, Alix and I would make love on the couch.

  “Ancient history,” I say. “It can’t still work.”

  “Believe it,” Winston says. “The altar’s got juice. We discovered a live outlet in Jesus’s feet.”

  Overhead, Gladstone nods. “It’s a miracle. Like on Touched by an Angel.”

  I glance across the alley at the Salvation Station of the Holy Redeemer, formerly Most Precious Suffering of Christ the Genuine. The city’s been threatening demolition since Hurricane Fran collapsed the roof and the near wall. But the other three walls survive, and the rickety steeple still stands, stretching for heaven. Above the steeple now, the true moon rolls on its back. I cannot see its false twin from here, blocked by trees and downtown buildings, but I’m angry at myself for being tempted.

  I turn back to Winston, hand him the TV before it explodes in my hands. He says, “We’d hoped you might consider donating your antenna.”

  “Our cause is just,” Dr. Bacchus shouts, still at the chimney. “Plus it’s tax-deductible.”

  “Take it,” I tell them. “I got cable.” Forty-four dollars a month for soap operas and late-night anesthesia. “There was a cape with those boots,” I say to Winston. “A golden cape.”

  “Sure thing,” Dr. Bacchus says, now at the roof’s edge. “Had a black cow on it.”

  “It was a bull,” I explain.

  With a full mouth, Dr. Gladstone mumbles, “One of the Princess Street crew got it.”

  “How did you know about the cape?” Winston wants to know. But I don’t answer. For a moment my mind gets away from me, and I imagine driving to Second Chances, finding the table where volunteers have set out the relics of my former life alongside broken blenders and board games with missing pieces. I shake these images from my head. My life is a fine one.

  When Dr. Bacchus jumps down onto the deck, the whole thing rattles. His hair is combed, his face clean. He may shower at the shelter. Bacchus hunches over with Gladstone for a sloppy slice. “Flippin’ bolts are rusted shut. And that steel is old school—the real deal.” He stands with the droopy piece of pizza and chucks my shoulder. “So you got a hacksaw or what?”

  Head down, I’m trying not to picture Trevor digging through the boxes I left behind, turning the worn pages of the Bull Invinso scrapbook. And then it occurs to me that like Alix, Trevor is probably working tonight. Out of the house. I raise my face. “I got a better plan.”

  After I make the left onto Oleander and take my place in the evening traffic, I look over my shoulder at the boys, huddled around the pizza like a campfire. They insisted on staying together in the bed of the Ford. On WAOK, The Family Man is trying to sort out Frank from Jacksonville’s problem. He wants to know if he should buy his daughter the breast implants she’s demanding for her sixteenth birthday. I’d change, but my radio’s jammed, locked into this one station. A Volkswagen Bug putters ahead of me with a license plate that reads C841KME. I’m convinced it’s one of those vanity plates, but I can’t decipher its clever message, so I pass fast in the right lane.

  Distractions like license plates and The Family Man have been part of my battle plan all day, staying in the here and now of my fine life. This morning I ran Greenfield Lake. Then I changed the oil in the Ford. Had lunch at Whitey’s. I limited myself to one hour of afternoon soaps—Waves Will Crash—and went to the gym for a late workout with Hardy. Before I hit Video Galaxy, I drove over to Wrightsville Beach and took a few laps in the Atlantic. Today, I’ve been working hard to keep my mind where it needs to be.

  But as I near the light at 16th, I glance into oncoming traffic and boom—here comes our limo. It rumbles past me like a ghost ship, and in the tinted windows I catch a flash of my reflection. This should be no surprise. It’s almost nine o’clock after all, and it’s time we were on our way downtown, heading for O’Leary’s, a club that’s been out of business now for five years.

  “Red means stop!” Bacchus shouts through the window.

  I stomp on the brakes and feel the weight of the truck hunching up on me. Bacchus gives me a dirty look in the rearview mirror. Behind him, I can see our limo trailing cans and I turn away, face the red light.

  Across the street a Quicky Chicken spins its orange bucket, and I consider scrapping the new plan, hitting the drive-thru instead and picking up some extra greasy and then a case of Bud Light, sharing it with the boys back in the collapsed sanctuary they call home. Making the right I have in mind will send me down the memory gauntlet of 16th. I’ll have to pass Shipyard. But after all these years, there’s not a street in Wilmington that isn’t lined with flashbacks, perched like rooftop snipers. If I make a left here, I’ll pass the Dairy Queen where I used to buy Blizzards for Alix when she was pregnant as well as the intersection at Market where the Subaru died. If I go straight, I’ll encounter the Planet Foodville from which I’ve recently been banned.

  When the light goes green, I make the right, barely clipping the curb. We pass the looming lights of New Hanover Hospital, where they brought Snake the night his truck found that phone pole and where Brook spent a week when she was eight for what the doctors would only call “observation.” My face is known by the staff up on seven.

  A quarter mile later, gravestones rise from the grounds of St. James Cemetery. In the back, beneath a sycamore tree I can’t see in this dark, are the side-by-side plots Alix bought one rainy afternoon from a telemarketer. Typical Alix, always overplanning. I’ve wondered some nights, if Trevor gets my grave now too.

  Closing in on the crossroads at Shipyard I brace myself for the strip mall. It’s got a Wendy’s and a florist and a beauty salon called Skin Deep. Once upon a time it was home to Tae-Kwon-Do for Tots—give Alix credit for the snappy name. She had more for the little groups we formed: Ninja Niners, Assassin Eighters. As I pass, I can’t keep my eyes from roaming over, expecting somehow to see Alix through the huge glass front, leading the kids through their piercing side kicks and double thunder punches. Instead I see the painted puffy white clouds that are supposed to be popcorn. Our old space was rented out to people who sell gourmet varieties. Bolstered by a six-pack buzz, I went in there one night. They have the display case I built loaded with exotic flavors: cherry, cinnamon, jalapeño. Once we kept our trophies there. Our trophies and our medals.

  But those were the days before Trevor and ReelWorld came to town, the days when things felt certain. Between bouncing at O’Leary’s and the spot work as Bull Invinso, I was bringing in decent money. Alix got a part in the community playhouse’s Camelot. At just seven, Brook was set to test for her green belt. Martial arts were hot, and Alix was talking franchise. We bought the house on Asgard and everything was perfect.

  My life is perfect now too. I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s just a different kind of perfect, that’s all. Since the split with Alix I’ve lived a pressureless, failure-free existence. No stress, no doubt. Because I’m not Bull Invinso anymore. Nowadays I’m the Enigma Warrior from the Isle of Wykoki. I’m Agent 17 and AKA Rat. I am the Grave Digger and the Widow Maker and Ivan Sputniski and Deadbeat Dad. Some nights my face is too hideous to show in public, an acid burn or a bear attack, even radiation from Chernobyl. I’ve been wanted by Israeli counterintelligence, in the witness protection program, believed to be dead by high-ranking members of the United Nations, and on the run from a wife who’s sworn to shoot m
e for withholding child support. In the ring, under the mask, I just follow the script, and I can do no wrong.

  The strip malls and fast food joints behind me, I slide across the four lanes of College Avenue, invading no-man’s-land—suburbia central. If the Ford had a stealth mode, I’d engage it. Officially, I have no business in this quiet development, making this left onto Valhalla, this right onto Asgard, except every other Saturday when I get Brook for an overnight. That’s when I pull up to the curb—not the driveway!—and honk just once. Twice is making a big deal out of it, according to Alix. But tonight, as I slow to a stop, there’s no need to honk. I’m not here as part of some court-appointed visitation.

  I shut off the engine and the Brain Trust piles out. Gladstone wipes pizza grease onto his tattered jeans. Winston kneels to tighten the high laces of the golden sneakers, eyes up the dark Colonial. “How many bathrooms?”

  “Two and a half,” I answer.

  He nods his approval. I have no emotional reaction to seeing the house. It’s just another address. I point to the living room window, partly obscured by azaleas that Trevor hasn’t kept trimmed. “Here’s the deal. Inside that room is a forty-two-inch Trinitron. You’ll have to hop the fence and come in through the sliding back door. The lock’s been busted forever. Go through the kitchen, then head for the stairs. The Trinitron’s on your right, can’t miss it.”

  Gladstone adjusts my baseball cap on his head and smiles. “Mork and Mindy, na-nu, na-nu.”

  “Breaking and entering,” Bacchus states for the record.

  I make hard eye contact. “That TV is mine. We’re not stealing anything. This is a rescue mission.”

  “If it’s yours, you save it,” Bacchus says.

  The food in his stomach, or the ride in the open air, has sobered him up some. He has a good point. But it’s been four years since I walked out of that house. “If you want the big screen, get it. Otherwise, we go hacksaw hunting.”

  The three of them huddle. When they break, Winston flashes his mustard smile. “We choose to accept the challenge.”