Mission

by Paul Forrester-O'Neill

  There’s a TV showing minor league baseball that Jack squints to see with his half-shut eyes that want only to close and sleep. His shirt scratches him around the neck. He breathes gruffly through his mouth and his fingers sting every time he goes to pick up the glass. When he isn’t drinking his mouth shrivels into a dryness that makes him cough and blow, and when he isn’t coughing and blowing, he’s turning round in his seat to see if the door is opening. And when it does, leasing a near-winter chill into the place, it’s a group of suited businessmen who take a table by the window.

  After half an hour, the first tweaks of concern kick in. To begin with, he thinks it’s just his gut roiling but then as he finishes off his drink and orders another, he realises it’s not. The mouth dries even quicker, the eyes narrow, the brow draws. He loosens the collar of the shirt, shakes it. His scalp feels tender. He asks for water and gulps it when it comes and, as the four men in the window-seats laugh loudly, he gets a taste in his mouth that’s more than bourbon and cloves.

  After an hour, he starts to rewind the last few weeks. Then he goes back further, unfurls weeks into months and tries to get every action, every look, every conversation. He tries to get every time that Vincent took the money and every time he brought it back and handed it over, the dollar bills to Jack, right there in his hand, the visible, tangible bills, and the envelopes to the other guy, the envelopes he never once saw opened, never once saw the contents of. Take it, he said, take it and get me some more.

  He doesn’t know what to do. It’s been over an hour and as he sits there, his stomach as tight as a drum-skin, the bourbons swilling in his head, those voices of the past start to kick in louder. Every time is the first time, he hears. There’s no such thing as luck, it’s a system. This is the easiest money I ever made in my whole life. Put out an extra place, honey, I’m bringing a friend. He sees the grimace again, the gesture, the way he slips the phone back neat in the holster of his pocket.

  Ten minutes later, after stumbling off the stool, he’s on his way to Vincent’s apartment, dragging his heavy bones and his pounding head with him, the sweat streaming from his face in spite of the wind coming off the river. He gets to the building, climbs the stairs to the third floor and makes his way along the hallway. He knocks, leans up against the doorframe, out of breath, leaden, hearing nothing but those old, repeated words. With his weak, stinging fingers, he raps again, and as he does so, a neighbour steps out into the hallway in a stained vest. He looks Jack up and down. Nobody lives there, fella, he says. It’s empty. Apart from a couple of days in the summer, it’s been empty almost two years.

  Jack held up his right hand in a gesture that said, for the night at least, he was done. His head lolled onto his chest, the shoulders slumped and John, standing up from the chair, went across to the bed and, holding both the back of his brittle skull and the sticky spine, slithered him a few inches further down, covering his shoulders with the quilt and the thickest of the blankets. As his father closed his eyes, he reached out and held his sallow face, the parchment skin, the cheekbone ridge, the florets of bloodshot veins, and without an ounce of pre-meditation, he leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead.

  “Let’s go back,” his father said.

  In the morning, he shaved him over the sink, watching the filings of his growth gather on the water. When he started to brush his hair in front of the speckled mirror, his father turned his face away, and when he went to put on his shoes, he couldn’t, for the swelling, for the bloated ankles that rose up to shiny, bloated calves with streaks of indigo and lime. He packed the car alone.

  Jack stayed shoeless in the diner. He’d eaten next to nothing and the coffee had gone cold and most of the time he sat and nursed himself. The medication he’d lined up carefully, like a parade, like a mix of the cylindrical and the round, the white and the yellow and the pale, eggshell blue, and then he’d swept every one of them off the table, scattering them to the floor with a growl he could hardly contain.

  They headed west, back through the welter of towns and cities they’d gone through the day before, past landmarks, billboards and road-signs. The car, by this time, was showing major signs of fatigue.

  The pocks and crusts of the exhaust had become rust-rimmed holes that puttered and blew, the third wheel rim rolled away somewhere mid-morning and the one remaining wiper blade wore down to next to useless. Every time they stopped for longer than ten minutes, they left an oil leak. And every time they started out again the engine sputtered and strained.

  Jack twitched. He was barefoot, his eyes deeper-set, his shirt unfastened, the hairs on his upper chest matted with sweat. This time it was thinner when he spoke, the pauses longer, the gathering of breath sometimes mid-sentence, mid-word even, the plosives panted and puffed.

  He looks for Vincent and his hairy-eared accomplice for almost a year, stopping off in towns large and small in every part of the state and beyond. He goes into corner bars and non-corner bars, sits at hundreds of counters, drinks his beers and asks anyone he ever stops to talk to if they’d seen or heard of or knew of a guy who did what Vincent did. He gets nothing. And the more of that nothing he gets, the more eaten away by it he becomes, and the more eaten away he becomes so his powers of door-to-door coercion and charm start to slide, and with that his commission, and his rent and soon enough his whole ability to function on a regular week-to-week basis. It’s not just the trickery that gets him, not just the itsy-bitsy mechanics of the scam, every last detail of which he goes over every night in his sleep, it’s his own gullibility, it’s the skewering sense of his own stupidity.

  Within two years he’s drunk most of what money he had left. He loses his job, his car, his place to live. He gives up on finding Vincent, on the Venezuelan bees. He sells his surplus shirts and shoes. He gets stomach cramps on a regular basis, headaches and migraines, throws up nuggets of crimson phlegm and, in a town he can’t remember the name of, a doctor whose face he can’t picture tells him he’s had an internal collapse and he needs help.

  There are months then he barely remembers; a winter in a clapboard house, sea mist every morning, the proximity of rail-tracks. There’s a town bedecked in frost, drifts of feet-high snow out where the suburbs meet the open land, and, when the harshness of winter is done, there’s a hospital with grounds the size of a golf course, with a network of corridors and wards with pale-green walls and radiators so hot they crack the paint.

  There’s medication for the stomach cramps, for the migraines, for the biliousness. There’s something for the frenzy of withdrawal. And there’s something, every clear, spring morning scored by birdsong, that zones him out most of the day, that makes everything in the world feel exactly the same. One day, at the pitch of that blandness when nothing moves that hasn’t had its edges taken off, he’s told in a white-walled office with posters of the Rockies and Christ the Redeemer that his internal collapse is permanent, that it’s inoperable, and that there is a definable limit to his life.

  After a few months, as the news sinks, falls into nothingness and crackles on a constant medication loop, as the azaleas bloom and the watered grounds prick with brighter colours that sometimes register and sometimes don’t, there’s a letter.

  He doesn’t remember receiving it but he remembers reading it because he remembers taking it into the glare of the bathroom and sitting in one of the cubicles. He remembers it was just before the night medications, in those moments when, sometimes, the skin and the muscles and the brain flickered enough to give him a modicum, at least, of understanding.

  The gist of it is that the aunt that raised him, the stern-faced woman he’s seen maybe two or three times over the last forty years, who brushed his hair with such vigour that tears would come to his eyes, has died, and that, as the sole surviving relative, he’s entitled to what she left behind, namely the house she’d always lived in, the contents therein, what money there was and the deeds to a plot of land, owned by his grandfather, Patrick, his father’s father, with a place to
live on it, in a town called Mission two thousand miles to the west.

  That’s the gist. That’s minus all the jargon and the legalese. And he understands it as he sits in the cubicle and holds the letter in his hands. The following day, after the morning medication, it starts to get faint again but over the next few weeks, after reading it over and over during that hour of slight reprieve, it gets clearer. And by the time he leaves, late in the summer, with his old hide suitcase the colour of cocoa, it’s embedded.

  He goes back to the house, sells it and most of the contents, some in an auction-house and most in a yard sale. He transfers the money into his own dwindled account and sits down with the deeds: The story he knows from his childhood, the panhandling grandfather, the card game and the winning of the land. What he doesn’t know, what his aunt never chose to tell him, is that the land is, specifically, his, and that the house on it was built for him by the grandfather he never met just after his father was killed.

  It’s not a difficult decision to make. What is there to lose? He has an inoperable disease, nowhere to call home, no people to call family. And so, after the separation and divorce, after losing all contact with his one and only son and after Vincent, heading across the country to a place built out of love and consideration is hardly a big deal.

  They reached the lake in the cool of early evening. Clouds had gathered in and the water shone armour-grey with the faintest patina of mist. John took the Toyota over the stones again, left it closer to the woods this time, closer to the kindling and sticks. He prepared everything, his hands always busy while his father slept in the car; the stove he assembled, the chairs he unfolded, the bowl, the pots and pans, the soft-bristled brush for his father’s hair.

  He knew instinctively when his father would wake. And when he did, he lifted him once more and carried him to where he’d set the chairs. He sat him down, mummified by blankets, the head protruding small and turtle-like. He made coffee, a pan of hot beans and a couple of sizzling eggs. His ear pricked to birdsong.

  “Bufflehead. You hear that?”

  His father shook his head, just the once.

  “High metabolic rates. Monogamous. The males and females both have a large white patch behind the eye, not behind the eye, but…I want to fuck with his head.”

  The turtle head rose.

  “Vincent. I want to fuck him up, badly.”

  A creamy half-moon sidled over the tops of the trees.

  “It’ll eat you alive. Find something else. Move on.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Trust me.”

  John stood up. He scraped morsels of food onto the shale, gathered up the pots and pans and washed them noisily in the bowl. “You’re telling me to forget?”

  “Forget? No.”

  “What then?”

  “It becomes every waking moment. That’s what I’m telling you. You’re either rearranging the past or organising the future. Either way, it’s no good.”

  “But I’d find him. Make no mistake.”

  “And when does it stop?”

  “When it’s done.”

  “And then what? After you’ve fucked him up. What happens then?”

  John shrugged as he swept up the kindling and sticks, the pieces of dry wood he pushed and scraped.

  “It’s not that simple. That’s what I’m saying. There is not one thing that has not been caused by another. You can take any point in your life and figure how you got there. And then when you’ve figured it and traced it back, where are you but at another point? You see what I’m saying? Now, scratch my foot, would you?”

  The moon sailed out into the open sea of sky. John picked up one of the sticks, bulbous at one end, sharp at the other. He held the lustrous bone at the sharp end, knelt down in front of him and rubbed at his father’s soles with the other. He could hear the loose rattles, could see the sheen of his puffed feet, the face in borrowed moonlight, the faintest trail of egg-yolk on the chin. He walked back to the chair, stared out across the water, across the surface black as eels.

  “You said ‘lost contact’?”

  “When?”

  “When you were talking about going back to the Cassidy land.

  You said you separated and divorced and you lost contact with your son. What does that mean?”

  Jack looked down into the fire.

  “What does it mean?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Forget it. You were five years old. I understand.”

  “What do you understand?”

  “That I was not a good father. I was unreliable. I was late all the time. I wasn’t there. I drank.”

  “And? What is it that you understand?”

  His father’s face rooted down an inch or two into its scrawny neck and his spidery fingers perched onto the fringe of the blanket.

  “That you didn’t want to see me. That you’d had enough.”

  John dropped the stick onto the shale.

  “What makes you say that? Why would you say that? I never said that. I was five years old. You’re my father. What made you think that?”

  The bufflehead sounded again from the wood’s edge.

  “Who told you? Who would say such a thing?”

  He saw Jack swallow, the lurch of gristle in his throat. “Your mother.”

  “She told you I didn’t want to see you? Is that what she said? That winter’s day, when you came for me and drove away?”

  “I tried. I tried to stay in touch. I tried every year on your birthday to speak to you.”

  “I would never say that. Never.”

  He watched his father pull at the cotton strands. He watched him pick one loose and feed it slowly between his fingers. The more he pulled, the more it came, and the longer it grew, the more separate from the rest it got. And the more he looked at it, the more he saw the twill and the weave, the more he felt it in the rub of forefinger and thumb. John saw the softening in his face as he did so, the scaf-folding of the bones that held his features in place ease a single notch, the hoary skin drop a little. He saw the shoulder frame drop, the chest bone sag and not struggle to gather those pockets of breath. And he saw, on the shores of the blackening lake, with the moon no sooner set sail than swallowed up by the clouds, the look, just the once, over towards his only son, to everything he was from the day he was born, to every day that he’d ever seen him, to every time he’d held onto his hand and walked with him, to every conversation they’d ever had and every time that he’d held him, and then let him go, the look that knew, in those moments, that there never was an abandonment, there was no rejection.

  John looked back at him. “She told me the same thing.”

  The rain began to fall as John stamped out the fire, picked up the brittle frame of his father, and lay him on the backseat with a combination of pillows for his head. He stood by the car with its mottled rust and snapped blades, and he started to imagine the version of his life with his father there, not as if airlifted into a scene, but right there, ordinarily.

  He imagined him at every birthday party, watching him as he blew the candles out on his cake, breaking off a piece of the icing, raising his eyebrows at the sweetness as he ate it. He imagined him waiting outside every school that he went to, in cotton shirtsleeves and tan, polished brogues and a smile that broke open every time he came out. He imagined chess games on warm afternoons, his younger hands on a clean-shaven chin, in a calculation, just like his own, of several moves hence. He was there with him in the freight trains, there in the corners lined with straw, in the shudder of the cars, there in the barns and shacks. He was there when, for months, he stopped even trying to reattach himself to a world he could no longer connect with, there on the farmland, in the beach houses, the cheap apartments. He went to Florida with him. He could see him in the sheen of the polished cars, in the hubcaps and mirrors, always somewhere on the forecourt, the shirt verging on gaudy, the shoes canvas. He could see him in the hotels and bars, watching him cook, wait tables, rustle up a cocktail or t
wo. He’d catch him in various places; in the surfaces of the kitchens, in the plenitude of silver, bent on the back of a serving spoon even. He’d find him in lobbies, on a sunken leather chair next to a potted palm, reading almanacs and magazines. Or, at the end of the counter, eating pretzels from a bowl, or in the corridors, the stairways or escalators, or the Zorro’d fire-escapes that zigzagged the buildings. Always there, always somewhere.

  When he woke, the steam was rising off the hood of the car. Out across the lake the mist trembled like the shimmer of a thousand lockets and the hills beyond were a palette of ochres and rust, of elephant-grey, soot-black and plum. Over by the trees, he could see the collapse of last night’s fire, the charred tinder, the white-rimmed remnants of bark and the bed of ash. With the window rolled down, he could sniff out the stretches of heavy sand, the plumb and gulp of deep water and faint-metal rain that hung in the trees. His cocked ear turned to get the buffleheads, teals and greygeese.

  He felt warm and sticky-faced. His hair was tousled, his lips dry. There was a scarlet weal on his cheekbone where he’d leant up against the window most of the night. He opened the door, took off his boots and days-old socks, put his feet on the stone and navigated his way across the shoreline to the water’s edge. He got to his haunches and splashed his face, rubbed at it, ran the water back through his hair, felt it scoot down his back. He stood up and faced out across the lake. The mist started to fritter. The low sun to the east skittered the bilberry and petrol blues of the lake, dazzled the blacks and quicksilver greys.

  He headed back. And he wasn’t sure why, some ten or so paces from the car, that same, sudden twist in his gut slowed him up again, or why it didn’t stop right there but spread to the ends of his fingers and the back of his throat and why it dipped into his bowels or jellied his knees or made his shoulders sag like sacks of glutinous sap. He didn’t know why the closer he got to the car it felt like he was wading through thigh-deep water or why his mouth dried up or what it was that tapped out those extra beats in his heart or why that frontal lobe of his felt so scrambled he could find no words to think with. Then he knew.