Mission

by Paul Forrester-O'Neill

  “What is it?”

  “Get up. Come on.”

  “What?”

  “We’re not doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “It’s over. Let’s go.”

  “Just let me be.”

  “No, I won’t. Come on. We’re leaving.”

  The sound of bed springs and shuffling feet, of drapes swooshing back, of a light switch clicked on again, and the tiniest chink in the door that let out that warm, pungent air and a paper-thin voice that said, “Where are we going?”

  “Back.”

  It was not exactly a regular father-son road trip. To begin with, the two men had nothing that drew them together. They had no memories, no shared experiences and so for the first couple of days they sat in the old Toyota with the landscape moving by them, like the same two magnetic poles trying, clumsily and without success, to make a connection.

  Jack slept much of the time anyway, his head either back or slumped down on his plaid shirt, as John drove and chewed and stared ahead, heading randomly south and then cutting across to the east and the north-east. The land grew flatter, the roads straighter. They’d hit great stretches of pasture and farmland, fields of rapeseed and corn, acres of wilderness, of woodland and scrub and plain. Sometimes John listened to the radio. Sometimes he stopped at a roadside store, picked up a few provisions, put them in the well of the back seat and sat as his father wheezed next to him. Sometimes he’d sit by the side of the car and scrape at the rust. The sills were the worse. Looking at the cupric shading he could tell some of it had started at least five years ago and been ignored since. Then there were the pocks and crusts around the exhaust, which sputtered the faster he went. One of the wiper blades was broken. The screenwash was disconnected, the dipstick jammed. A couple of the hubcaps were chipped and split. Whenever Jack coughed, he had to slow down to listen.

  From the homestead, he brought an array of blankets in degrees of thickness. He brought case-less pillows the colour of semolina, a brush-mat to put his father’s feet on whenever he took his shoes off. He brought a kitchen bowl, six boxes of tissues, liquid soap. He brought a brush for the rust, a brush for the shoes and a brush for his father’s hair. He brought a small portable stove, a cool box with ice, and pots and pans that shook in the trunk next to the frames of the collapsible chairs. He brought air freshener that smelled of fresh linen on a summer’s day.

  For the first two nights, he pulled over to the side of the road whenever he got tired, closed his eyes and got some rest. On the third, they found a motel and shared a mid-size room on the ground floor. They slept in single beds with the texture of watermelon flesh. A night lamp, hung at an angle on the wall, strained out light the colour of beeswax, the faucet dripped and hawked up something glutinous and brown and, throughout the night, waking them both every time, came the sound of restless, hirsute beasts from the land beyond.

  They had breakfast of pancakes and coffee in a diner next to the motel, suffocatingly bright, with a jukebox that jumped. Jack got crumbs around the corner of his mouth and a syrup stain on his shirt. The coffee mug shook in his hand, rattled against his teeth. He took his medication by lining up the various tablets on the table top and taking them one by one, his throat lurching as he swallowed them, his eyes closing with each gulp. As they got up to go, John picked up a napkin, dampened it with spittle and rubbed at the stain, hearing the creaks of his father’s breath as he did so, feeling with his steadying hand the scooped-out groove between the scrawny neck and the ridge of shoulder bone. Jack thanked him, apologised quietly, and thanked him again.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day, they stopped by the side of a lake. John took the car as far across the pebbled shore as he could. He took out the chairs from the trunk and faced them towards the sun close to the water’s edge. Then he guided his father over the stones, sat him down, took off his shoes and socks and, carrying the kitchen bowl back and forth to the lake, he bathed his feet, grooving the water between his toes with his thumb. He cut the nails, filed down the growth of hard skin on his heels. He unbuttoned the plaid shirt, slipped it back off his shoulders, wrapped the near-translucent torso in one of the softer blankets and washed the shirt in the lake, squeezing the water out tight and leaving it draped across the stones to dry. He then put a towel over the blanket and, with the sunlight trembling across the water and the bowl back on his father’s lap, he shaved him, taking the blade up from throat to chin, pinching his nostrils shut, watching his father go from staring up at the sky to closing his eyes, like a child.

  He used the towel to dry his face and a tissue to stem a small nick on the lobe of his ear. Then he took out the brush for his father’s hair and softly swept it back, hardly touching the scalp of the frail and blanketed figure with the bare feet and the sunlight warm upon his face. He fetched one of the pillows from the car and settled it behind his head. “Close your eyes,” he said, “listen to the birdsong.”

  He took a walk along the shoreline, gathered up kindling and armfuls of dry wood, and laid them down on a flatter stretch of sand and shale closer to the line of trees. When he got back and his father slept and the sun began to sink down below the western hills turned to burgundy felt, he poached eggs, cooked beans and made coffee on the stove.

  They ate as the water lapped on the pebbles. The sky was roseate and lilac, the lake silvery-black. A fingernail of a jaundiced moon sloped above the trees behind them and by the time Jack had laid his empty plate down and sucked out the last few dregs of the coffee, by the time he’d been draped in the blankets; around the shoulders and the dried, plaid shirt, across the lap, and covering the swollen, stockinged feet, John had finished up and a small fire was crackling away. He held a stick of driftwood like a monkey’s forearm, poked at the fire with it.

  “My aunt used to drag that comb across my skull until it bled.”

  The following morning the mist hung low over the lake. The two men sat around the embers of the fire and drank lukewarm, sugarless coffee and when it was time to go, John lifted his father from the chair and carried him back to the car, his arm cradled under his back, his father’s head nestled inwards in the bowl of his shoulder.

  They drove aimlessly east for the next few days. They needed a new tyre, an oil change, a makeshift fan belt. They had to stop every time it rained because of the buckled wiper. They lost one of the chairs to the wind and one of the blankets to an old man by the side of the road with a single tooth and a sick dog. The air freshener ran out, so too the tissues.

  They began to speak more, in ways they hadn’t before, about ordinary things, about the food they ate or the coffee they drank, about the landscape they passed or the weather that blessed them with sunlight, cloud or rain. Sometimes they spoke about other stuff; chess moves, card tricks, puzzles and conundrums, about those multifarious facts from the encyclopaedias that Jack used to sell and John used to read, about the best cotton of the shirts and the best leather of the shoes. They named the presidents together, ran off the states in alphabetical order and between them, a good majority of the capitals. But with all of those, and with every sideways look they made in the other’s direction, every half-smile and nod, there was still no place for abandonment, no room for rejection, or for the cold winter’s day almost twenty years back.

  In the early evening of the second Saturday, with the promise of heavier rain, they pulled into the parking lot of a town’s-edge motel. John got out, checked the rust, booked the room and took whatever belongings they might need while his father slept. He sat in the room as the rain started in from the east and the low bellies of the clouds glistened with gloom. From where John was, leaning forward on the edge of the bed, he could see out across the lot. He could see his father’s face slanted towards the window, the narrowed mouth slightly open, the forehead resting on the pane, the knuckles up around the chin, and as soon as those eyes drew themselves open and there was the slightest movement in his spindled frame he was out, running across the lot in the driv
ing rain and sitting in the car until it stopped.

  The room stank of nicotine and crusted male sweat. The bed was a double with a quilt the colour of lemon rind. The two men ate take-away noodles in a carton, John quickly, his father slowly, dragging the pasta up to his mouth and sucking it gradually in or letting it dangle back down into the cardboard bucket, staining his chin as he did so. After he’d done, and John had propped him up against the head-board, cleaned him up, changed his shirt, washed the old and dirty one in the sink, brushed his teeth, taken off those shoes no longer of the best leather and listened to the whistle of his father’s chest, he sat on the wicker chair in the corner of the room, and said, “So why did you go back to the Cassidy land?”

  For a while his father couldn’t, and didn’t, answer. The truth was he didn’t know where to start. Every time he thought he’d found somewhere he needed to explain how that point had been arrived at, and when he’d explained that and had another starting point, he had no option but to explain that one too. And so on, until he was all the way back to Patrick John Cassidy walking into the Station Hotel and winning the land in a card game.

  His mouth moved several times as if to begin. His head nodded, his brow furrowed, his hands twitched. His story, when he started, was this: He was a fifty-five-year-old divorcee whose days of vigour and fizz were done. He drank. He gambled. He still moved around from place to place but it was less to do with the spontaneity of the younger man and more about the dulled pragmatism of the working salesman with no other choice. He tried to tell himself that his purpose was as strong as it ever had been, but everything else seemed to say otherwise; the low sales figures, the lost, chaotic weekends, the medication for the shakes. He tried to convince himself that, as with all salesmen, there were good days and bad days and you couldn’t legislate for the vicissitudes of a life that hung almost entirely on the whims of other people. But then those good days were rare and those whims, instead of being unpredictable, started to become wholly predictable because those other people were not convinced enough. They didn’t like the booze fumes. They didn’t like the sweat. They didn’t like being persuaded by a man who couldn’t look after himself.

  And so, one particular night, after another long and fruitless day dragging those encyclopaedic tomes door to door to people who no more needed the bee population of Venezuela than they did a slap in the face, he was sitting in a bar on the corner of a downtown street. He’d been living there a week, in a small apartment above a Chinese laundry close to the river, and was nursing a beer in one hand and a bourbon in the other when a well-dressed man walked in, sat next to him and, with a firm handshake, introduced himself as Vincent.

  Now, when you’re fighting an uphill battle with your dignity and your sense of purpose is on the wane then the sight of an obviously successful man could go one of two ways. Either you resent him, or, in Jack’s case, the fact that he reminded him of himself as a younger man kindled something inside him. There was a silkiness, a grace of movement, a congruence. And the spiel was just like listening to his own effortless patter back in the halcyon days of real estate, cars, shirts and leather shoes. It was there. It was in the moment. The man was in his heyday.

  Anyway, Vincent stays for maybe an hour and then excuses himself, saying he has to get home, he’s new in the neighbourhood, and his wife would be waiting. In fact, just as he’s leaving she calls and he makes one of those grimaces, man to man, designed to encapsulate that whole masculine experience of compromise in a matter of seconds. And then he’s gone.

  He’s there again a week later. This time Jack is sharing the counter with a bulky forty-something who has cynicism coming out of his hairy ears already, about everything; his life, everybody else’s life, the government, the tax system, you name it, he has a gripe about it and you’d hear about it whether you wanted to or not. Vincent’s more casual this time. His wife is away on business for a few days, so he can relax, he can stay a while longer and have a beer with his buddies down at the bar and not have anyone tell him otherwise, right? The other guy is as cynical about Vincent as he is about everything and everyone else. “He’s a shyster,” he whispers, “Look at him. Look at his nails.”

  At the end of the night, they’re onto sport, horse racing in particular, about which the cynic is a self-confessed aficionado. He knows the horses, he knows the tracks, he knows the trainers and the split-times, and he says anyone who places more than a single, one-off bet needs their heads examining. Why? Because they’ll never win overall. Once, yes, twice, maybe, anything more than that, forget it. Vincent disagrees. He says he’s got a system. It’s not foolproof but it’s as good as anything he’s seen. Show me your ten bucks. I’ll find a horse and I’ll prove how good the system is, he says. The cynic scowls, mutters something under his breath and keeps his hand on the counter. Jack, on the other hand, whether it’s the chance to piss the cynic off or it’s that Vincent has that same barely restrained swagger that he used to have, doesn’t.

  The next week Vincent walks in, stands there in between Jack and the other guy. For you, my cynical friend, he says, nothing. But for you Jack, here’s your one hundred bucks. What did I tell you about the system? And if either of you gentlemen are interested, I can make the same thing happen again. And again, the other guy doesn’t move and Jack offers up another ten. A week later Vincent shuffles eighty bucks into Jack’s hand and leaves.

  The next time the cynical guy isn’t there. Vincent and Jack bat the breeze about this and that, mainly Jack and his younger days, how much real estate or insurance he sold, how many cars, how many shirts, how many shoes and how, with a spring in his step, he was going to make those encyclopaedias fly again. After an hour, Vincent gets the call from his wife. He nods, pulls the grimace, then looks over at Jack and says into the phone, “Honey, put out an extra plate. I’m bringing a friend.” So, they go back. Jack meets Vincent’s wife, they eat, Vincent calls Jack his bar buddy and they spend a couple of pleasant hours together. The food is good. The apartment is warm-coloured and tasteful. There’s music on from Jack’s heyday and by the end of the night he’s telling them all about his father and Utah beach, about his mother, his aunt and uncle, the way she used to drag the comb across his skull and how, at seventeen years of age, he jumped a train heading east with his packed bag and never went back. And then he parted with fifty bucks to Vincent’s system.

  The following week the other guy’s back there next to Jack. Vincent comes in and without saying a word, as if handing out candy bars in kindergarten, counts out five hundred dollars into the palm of Jack’s hand. There is no third time, he says to the other guy. Every time is the first. Think about it. “It’s just luck,” the guy says. “There is no such thing as luck,” says Vincent, “it’s a system.” “So what is it?” the guy says. At this point, Vincent smiles, slaps the guy on the shoulder and says: “I’m not going to sit here and tell you my system, now am I? Why don’t you show me your ten bucks and we’ll see what’s what? Carpe diem, my man. Seize the goddamned day.”

  The other guy, with some hesitation, hands over his ten, and Jack, after a good week on the encyclopaedias, gives him a hundred without so much as a flinch. Then Vincent gets his call, does his grimace, and leaves.

  This happens for the next three weeks. The other guy gives him ten and Jack a hundred, and every time Vincent walks in and pays them. Every time is the first, he says, it’s like a new roll of the dice. For Jack, it was like being in his twenties again. It was summers on the coast, selling second homes with sea views. It was Cadillacs and Cuban heels. He felt good about himself. And there was a spring in his step when he walked those neighbourhood streets and if people did start to get a little more curious about those Venezuelan bees and their numbers, then Vincent and his system was playing no small part in it.

  By this time, the other guy is converted and the ten bucks gets quickly upgraded to twenty then fifty then a hundred until one particular night he comes in with a thousand dollars and gives it to Vincent.
And the following week Vincent comes in and hands the guy an envelope- “Ten thousand dollars, my friend.” “Take it,” the guy says, “take it and get me some more. I need a vacation.” And so Vincent takes it and a week later he’s back with fifty thousand. “Do it again,” the guy says, “this is the easiest money I ever made in my whole life.”

  At this point, Jack is stirred, because Jack is still throwing his hundred in and what he picks up every week starts to seem small fry by comparison with the thickening envelopes the other guy stuffs in his pocket or folds between his newspaper. He also finds out that the other guy, the guy so cynical to begin with, has been to Vincent’s apartment, has met his wife, eaten there, and taken them out on more than one occasion. He tries to tell himself he’s making good money every week. He tries to convince himself it’s enough. But it’s not. He has a couple of bad weeks on the encyclopaedia run. The night sweats come back. There’s a couple of weeks when Vincent is on vacation, when the hairy-eared smug-fuck is in there showing him a postcard of where he is, shows him the resort and tells him he’s thinking of buying a place out there himself, on Vincent’s recommendation. It’s an investment, he says, it’s for the future.

  And so, when Vincent comes back and the other guy hands him the envelope back and says, “Do it again,” Jack does the same. His hand shakes slightly as he hands over the envelope, his eyes avert Vincent’s and his mouth tightens, because what he doesn’t say and tries not to show is that the money in the envelope is pretty much all he has. It’s that mixture of savings and winnings and what small pots of honey those Venezuelan bees produce.

  He has another bad week. His gut aches, his head pounds most of the day and on the Thursday night he spikes a three-figure temperature that should keep him hunkered down in his bed for a few days. But no. The following night he’s on the bar stool by eight. OK, his bourbon is hot and sprinkled with cloves, and whenever he moves his bones feel like lead pipes stuffed with sap, but he’s there all the same. On his own. Sometimes he does get there first. Sometimes the other guy, instead of already being there with his newspaper and the wrapped cigar he rolls between his fingers, wanders in a few minutes later. It’s happened. Vincent, of course, is always last.