CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When I arrived at my desk on Monday, Dan was standing over it, scratching his head. I looked around him, into my cubicle. A custodian was on his hands and knees under my desk, pulling a cord down through a freshly drilled hole in the fake wood. On top of the desk was a shiny new white phone.

Dan gave me a guilty smile. It was the same smile that elementary school teachers always gave me when they changed my seat so I could be by the new kid, or the newly mainstreamed Special Ed kid. Just show him around, they’d say. Or just be his friend. I always got these dubious honors—honors that had more to do with my dunderheaded good nature than any perceived smarts. Dan’s new role for me had an uncomfortably similar feel.

“I guess phones aren’t a seniority thing around here,” I said.

“No,” Dan said. “Not exactly. We thought you might like to try to field some phone calls from the public.”

Cliff was already at his desk. I heard him shift and start clip-clopping away at his computer keys.

“We thought you would be good at it,” Dan said.

“We’ll see, I guess.”

“You’ll learn a lot,” Dan assured me.

“Terrific,” I said.

“Not about lexicography, perhaps, but about humanity.”

A snort escaped Cliff’s cubicle.

Dan gave my cubicle a friendly tap before walking away.

Mr. Phillips seemed uncomfortable on Tuesday evening, when we all met for coffee.

“This is a real treat,” he said heartily. “I’m glad you’re joining us here today, Mona.”

“Thanks for having me along,” was her reply.

“Good to have some female intuition on this little project,” he continued.

“Oh, yeah. I should think.” I sensed a little sarcasm in her words. “Considering that female intuition’s what started it. Or maybe just lexicographer’s intuition?”

“You think there’s such a thing?” he asked.

“Certainly. Thanks for doing all that work to find those first 1953 cits, by the way,” she said. “That’ll save us a lot of time.”

“Did you dig up the rest?” Mr. Phillips wanted to know.

“Of 1953? No,” Mona answered. “We’re about halfway done with 1951.”

She reached into her leather bag and pulled out a few photocopied sheets. She’d made copies for each of us.

Mr. Phillips put on his glasses and held one of the pages out in front of his face. He let out a couple of grunts of interest as he read.

“Poor girl,” he muttered a couple of times.

Something about the way he said it made me ask:

“You ever been married, Mr. Phillips?”

“Yeah,” he muttered. “For a few years. Long time ago. Didn’t work out.”

“Can I ask … What happened?”

“Sure. She left in ’78. Left the country. Went to Europe with the feminists.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Mona sputtered into her latte.

“Just what I said,” Mr. Phillips said irritably.

“Went to Europe with the feminists?” Mona repeated. “What, just like that? Like they were a traveling band of gypsies or something?”

“You got it, sister,” Mr. Phillips muttered. “Your comparison is an apt one, I’m afraid.”

Mona gave me a look that clearly said, I’ll let you take this one.

“Mr. Phillips—” I began.

“You think you’ll ever get married, Billy?” he interrupted.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You seem like the marrying type,” Mr. Phillips persisted. “I can see it. I can just see you on your sit-down mower, earning points so you can have your afternoon off to watch a little baseball.”

“Hey,” said Mona. “That’s kinda harsh, don’t you think?”

“Oh, wait,” Mr. Phillips said, scratching his head vigorously. “Not his sit-down mower. I forgot. His motorcycle.”

“Motorcycle?” Mona said. “Now, that doesn’t fit at all.”

Mr. Phillips nodded at me knowingly. “See?”

“See what?”

“There will be naysayers. Have you told your parents about the motorcycle, son?”

“What motorcycle?” Mona asked.

“No,” I said to Mr. Phillips. “Of course not. My mother has probably helped remove donated organs from many a motorcycle accident victim.”

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Phillips said. “The perfusionist. I almost forgot.”

“So she’d probably be pretty dead set against it.”

“I’d say she’d have a point if she was.”

“You’re getting a motorcycle?” Mona asked.

“No,” I said. “Mr. Phillips and I were just talking man-talk the other day. We’re both alpha males, and I was trying to one-up him.”

“That’s not how I remember it,” he said.

“I know someone who was decapitated in a motorcycle accident,” Mona said, a little too proudly.

“You still know him?” I asked. “How does that work?”

“Well, I never really knew him. He was my friend’s cousin.”

“So it doesn’t bother you, then? The danger of it?” Mr. Phillips asked me.

“It’s a consideration, of course. Would it be too much of a cliché to point out that the danger is part of the appeal?”

“It’s not that it’s a cliché that I find objectionable,” Mona said. “It’s that it’s dumb.”

“Ahhh, Billy.” Mr. Phillips savored my name as if it were a warm sip of his precious Jamaica Blue Mountain. “Billy. Billy boy. Hey—anyone ever call you Willy?”

“No.”

“Willy. Old Willy. That reminds me of a little story,” Mr. Phillips said.

“Yeah?” I said, hoping to move away from the motorcycle topic. “Maybe you should tell it to us.”

Mona shot me a look that I couldn’t interpret.

“In Korea, I served with this guy named Willy. Birdless Willy, we called him. He was a little crazy. And he was missing the middle finger on his right hand.”

“How’d he lose it?” I asked.

“It was shot off. He had it shot off in a bar.”

“What?” Mona said.

“I’m telling you. Swore he gave a guy the finger once in a bar and the guy pulled out a piece and just shot it clear off his hand.”

“He was lying to you, Mr. Phillips,” Mona said. “Either that or you got that out of Blazing Saddles or something.”

“Well, whether or not the backstory was a lie, the guy didn’t have his right-hand bird.”

“How’d he shoot his gun, then?” I asked.

“He didn’t shoot. He was the company cook. But the real interesting thing about Willy is he got a second chance at a middle finger.”

Mr. Phillips paused dramatically.

“You see, at Old Baldy, some joker whacked a dead Red’s finger off and brought it back for Willy.”

“What’s Old Baldy?” I asked.

“That’s pretty sick,” Mona said. “And on a number of levels.”

“Well, honey. War is sick.”

“Did he keep the finger?” I asked.

“Now, that’s the real interesting part.”

“He kept it?” Mona said. “How? Did he salt it like jerky?”

“Hold your horses. No, he didn’t salt it. He joked that he boiled it down in one of our soups and picked out the bones to keep for himself. Left the fleshy finger bits in the soup. But I doubt that. We’d have gotten the squirts from that finger. That finger sure wasn’t fresh by the time it got to Willy.”

“God!” Mona said.

“He’d always claim he had the finger bones in his pocket. He’d jangle at his pocket, claiming he was gonna give one of us the finger someday. That is, leave the bones under one of our pillows, or in one of our bowls, or something sneaky like that. He’d say it pretty cryptic, like. So you weren’t sure if you were supposed to want the finger or not. Like it could be a curse, or it could be a good-luck charm. He’d say things like ‘Who here wants to stay in Korea forever? Well, let’s just see who gets this here finger.’”

“That sounds more like a curse to me,” I said.

“But some days, he’d say things like ‘Maybe I’ll just keep this little finger for myself. I kind of like having a finger again. I got my balance again. I got my yin and I got my yang.”

“He didn’t say that,” Mona hissed.

“Oh, he did, honey.”

“Americans didn’t know anything about Asian philosophy in the fifties,” Mona insisted.

“We were in Korea, for God’s sake. We knew a couple of things. And it was a Chinese guy’s finger, after all.”

Mona cringed.

“So who got the bones?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I got my stateside wound before Willy ever gave them to anyone. But I was glad it wasn’t me. Something told me those bones—whether or not they really existed—were like the key to Willy’s rubber room. Get the bones and you’d find yourself occupying it with him. If he ended up giving them away, I never heard who got them.”

“Didn’t you keep in touch with any of the guys in your company?”

“When I did, there were always more important things to discuss than Willy’s magic finger bones. Anyway, it’s important to know when to let a thing end.”

“I like how your story ends,” I said.

“It doesn’t exactly have an ending.” Mona looked disappointed.

“Sure it does. It ends with Mr. Phillips getting to go home.”

“With a hole in his gut,” Mr. Phillips added.

“Can I ask,” said Mona, folding her hands primly on the table, “if this is one of the stories that so moved Mary Anne?”

Mr. Phillips raised an eyebrow at Mona, and then turned to me.

“No,” he said. “No, I don’t think Mary Anne would have appreciated that one.”

Mona sighed. “Well then. While we’re on the subject of Mary Anne, I have a few questions for you. Nineteen fifty-one brings up some interesting findings.”

I took out our two most recent cits: