Then, suddenly, he fell, and I, I watched him fall. I watched my father falling off the roof of his own house. It happened so quickly I don’t know whether he tripped or slipped or what—he may have jumped for all I know—but he fell two stories into a large bed of shrubbery. Until the last second I kept expecting him to grow wings, and when he didn’t, when no wings came, I knew the fall had killed him. I was so sure he was dead I didn’t even rush to his side to see what could be done to save him, to revive him, possibly.
I walked, slowly, to the body. He was completely still, not breathing. On his face was that expression of beatific slumber that one associates with release from this world. A pleasant expression. I stared at it, memorized it—my father, my father’s face in death—when all of a sudden his face moved, he winked at me, laughed, and said, “Had you going there, didn’t I?”
His Greatest Power
When Edward Bloom left Ashland he made a promise to himself that he would see the world, and thus it was that he seemed forever moving, and never in one place for too long. There was not a continent that his foot didn’t touch, not a country that he didn’t visit, not one great city in which he could not find a friend. He was a true man of the world. He made cameo and yet heroic appearances in my own life, saving my life when he could, urging me toward my own manhood. And yet he was called away by forces greater even than himself; he was, as he said, riding the tiger.
But he liked to leave me laughing. This is how he wanted to remember me, and how he wanted to be remembered. Of all his great powers, this was perhaps his most extraordinary: at any time, at the drop of a hat, he could really break me up.
THERE WAS THIS MAN—we’ll call him Roger—who had to go out of town on business, and so left his cat in the care of a neighbor. Now, the man loved his cat, loved his cat beyond all things, so much so that the very night of the day he left he called his neighbor to inquire into the general health and emotional well-being of this dear feline. And so he asked his neighbor, “How is my sweet little darling precious cat? Tell me, neighbor, please.”
And the neighbor said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Roger. But your cat is dead. It was run over by a car. Killed instantly. Sorry.”
Roger was shocked! And not merely at the news of his cat’s demise—as if that weren’t enough!—but also at the way in which he was told about it.
So he said, he said, “That’s not the way you tell somebody about something as horrible as this! When something like this happens you tell the person slowly, you ease them into it. You prepare them! For instance. When I called this evening you should have said, Your cat’s on the roof. Then the next time I call you would say, The cat’s still on the roof, he won’t come down and he’s looking pretty sick. Then the next time I call you might tell me the cat fell off the roof and that he’s now at the vet in intensive care. Then, then the next time I call you tell me—your voice sort of quivery and shaky—that he died. Got it?”
“Got it,” said the neighbor. “Sorry.”
So three days later Roger called the neighbor again, because his neighbor was still watching the house and checking his mail, et cetera, and Roger wanted to know if anything important had happened. And the neighbor said, “Yes. As a matter of fact, yes. Something important has happened.”
“Well?” asked Roger.
“Well,” the neighbor said. “It’s about your father.”
“My father!” exclaimed Roger. “My father! What about my father?”
“Your father,” said the neighbor, “is on the roof . . .”
My father is on the roof. This is how I like to remember him sometimes. Well-dressed in a dark suit and shiny, slippery shoes, he is looking left, looking right, looking as far as his eyes will travel. Then, looking down, he sees me, and just as he begins his fall he smiles, and winks. All the way down he’s looking at me—smiling, mysterious, mythic, an unknown quantity: my dad.
In Which He Has a Dream
My dying father has a dream that he is dying. At the same time, it is a dream about me.
It goes like this: as news of my father’s illness spread, mourners began to gather in the yard, first just a few, but soon there were many, a dozen, then two, then half-a- hundred people, all standing around in the yard, ruining the shrubbery, crushing the monkey grass, huddling beneath the carport when it rained. Shoulder to shoulder in my father’s dream they swayed and moaned, waiting for word of recovery. Barring that, a glimpse of my father at the bathroom window as he passed before it sent up a wild and glorious cheer. My mother and I watched from the living-room window, unsure of what to do. Some of the mourners looked poor. They wore old, ragged clothes and their faces were dark with hair. They made my mother feel uneasy; she fingered the buttons on her blouse as she watched them stare sadly at the second-floor windows. But there were others who looked as if they had left some very important job to come to my father’s house and mourn. They had removed their ties and stuffed them in their pockets, the sides of their fine black shoes were rimmed with mud, and some of them had portable phones, which they used to communicate the proceedings to those who couldn’t be here. Men and women, young and old alike all looked upward toward the light of my father’s window, waiting. Nothing really happened for a long time. I mean, it was just our life, with the people outside in the yard. But the fact of it became too much, and after a few weeks of it my mother asked me to ask them to go.
And so I did. By this time, though, they were entrenched. A rudimentary buffet had been established beneath the magnolia, where they served bread and chili and steamed broccoli. They kept bothering my mother for forks and spoons, which were returned with the chili still on them, cold and hard to remove. A small tent city had appeared on the patch of open grass where I used to play touch football with some of the neighborhood kids, and word had it that a baby had been born there. One of the businessmen with the portable phones had set up a small information center on a tree stump, and people came to him if they wanted to get messages out to loved ones far away, or to find out if there had been any news of my father.
But in the middle of it all sat an older man in a lawn chair, overseeing everything. I’d never seen him before to my knowledge (or so went my father’s dream) but he looked somehow familiar—a stranger, and yet no foreigner to me. Occasionally someone came to him and said something close to his ear. He would listen thoughtfully, consider for a moment what the man had said, and then either nod or shake his head. He had a thick white beard and glasses, and he wore a fishing cap, in which several handmade lures were pinned. And so as he seemed to be some kind of leader, I went to see him first.
There was someone whispering to him as I approached, and as I opened my mouth to speak he raised a hand to quiet me. After the man had finished speaking the old man shook his head, and the messenger hurried off. Then the old man lowered his hand and looked at me.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m—”
“I know who you are,” he said. His voice was soft and deep, warm and distant at the same time. “You are his son.”
“That’s right,” I said.
We looked at each other, and as we did I tried to recall a name, for surely we had met somewhere before. But nothing came.
“You have some word for us?”
He watched me with rapt attention, almost seizing me with his stare. He was a most imposing man, my father told me.
“None,” I said. “I mean, he’s about the same, I guess.”
“The same,” the man said, weighing the words carefully as if to derive some special meaning. “He’s still swimming, then?”
“Yes,” I said. “Every day. He really loves it.”
“This is good,” he said. And suddenly he raised his voice and shouted, “He is still swimming!” And a great cry of rejoicing arose from the crowd. The man’s face was radiant. For a few moments he breathed deeply through his nose, and seemed to think things over. Then he looked at me again.
“But there’s something else you came
to tell us, isn’t there?”
“There is,” I said. “It’s just that, I know you mean well, and you all seem very nice. But I’m afraid that—
“We must go,” the man said calmly. “You want us to leave.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m afraid so.”
The old man took this in. His head seemed to nod briefly, as if it were moved by the news. This is the scene my father watched in his dream, as if, he said, from a distance, as though he were already dead.
“It will be hard,” the old man said, “to go. These people—they really care. They’ll be lost without this place. Not for long, of course. Lives have a way of getting on with themselves. But in the short run it will be hard. Your mother—”
“It makes her nervous,” I said. “All these people in the yard, day and night. You can understand that.”
“Of course,” he said. “And there’s the mess, too. We’ve almost completely destroyed the front yard.”
“There is that.”
“Not to worry,” he said, in a way that made me believe him. “We shall leave it as we found it.”
“She’ll be pleased.”
A woman ran up to me then and grabbed my shirt in her hands and rubbed her sobbing face against it, as if to determine my corporeality.
“William Bloom?” she said, and looked at me imploringly. She was a small woman, with thin wrists. “You are William Bloom, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, moving back a step or two, but she still clung to me. “I am.”
“Give this to your father,” she said, and thrust into my hand a miniature silk pillow.
“Healing herbs in a little pillow,” she said. “I made it myself. They might help.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll see to it he gets them.”
“He saved my life, you know,” she said. “There was a great fire. He risked his own life to save mine. And here—here I am today.”
“Not for long,” the old man said. “He’s asked us to leave.”
“Edward?” she said. “Edward Bloom has asked us to leave?”
“No,” he said. “His wife and son.”
She nodded.
“As you said it would be,” she said. “The son would come to us and ask us to leave. It is just as you said.”
“My mother asked me to,” I said, becoming frustrated with the mysterious talk and sly innuendo. “This is not something I enjoy.”
And suddenly there was a great collective gasp. Everyone was looking toward the windows on the second floor, where my father stood waving at the people in his dream. He was in his yellow bathrobe, smiling at them, occasionally picking someone out in the crowd he recognized and pointing, raising his eyebrows, and mouthing a word or two—Are you okay? Good to see you!—before moving on to someone else. Everyone waved, shouted, cheered, and then, after what seemed a visit of immensely brief proportions, he waved once again, and turned, and disappeared into the semidarkness of his room.
“Well,” the old man said, beaming, “that was something, wasn’t it? He looked good. He looked very good.”
“You’re taking good care of him,” a woman said.
“Keep up the good work!”
“I owe everything to your father!” someone called to me from beneath the magnolia, and what followed was a cacophony of voices, pure babble, telling some story or other about Edward Bloom and his good deeds. I felt surrounded by all the words. Then I felt surrounded: a converging line had formed around me, people talking all at once, until the old man raised his hand and shushed them, and they backed away.
“See,” the old man said. “We all have stories, just as you do. Ways in which he touched us, helped us, gave us jobs, lent us money, sold it to us wholesale. Lots of stories, big and small. They all add up. Over a lifetime it all adds up. That’s why we’re here, William. We’re a part of him, of who he is, just as he is a part of us. You still don’t understand, do you?”
I didn’t. But as I stared at the man and he stared back at me, in my father’s dream I remembered where we’d met before.
“And what did my father do for you?” I asked him, and the old man smiled.
“He made me laugh,” he said.
And I knew. In the dream, my father told me, I knew. And with that I walked through the yard and down the walk and back into the warmth of my glowing home. “Why does an elephant have a trunk?” I heard the old man bellow in his strong, deep voice, just as I closed the door. “Because he doesn’t have a glove compartment,” I mouthed along with him.
Followed by a great burst of laughter.
Thus ends my dying father’s dream about his death.
III
In Which He Buys a Town, and More
This next story rises from the mist of the past like a shadow.
Hard work, good luck, and a number of canny investments make my father a wealthy man. We move to a bigger house, a nicer street, and my mother stays at home and raises me, and as I grow my father continues to work hard as ever. He is gone weeks at a time, and comes home tired and sad, with little to say other than he missed us.
Thus, despite his great success no one seems happy. Not my mother, not me, and certainly not my father. There is even talk of disbanding the family altogether, it looks and acts so unlike one. But this doesn’t happen. Opportunities come in disguise sometimes. My parents decide to see the hard times through.
It is during these times, the mid-seventies, when my father begins to spend his money in unpredictable ways. One day he realizes that there is something missing in his life. Or rather it’s a feeling that comes over him slowly as he ages—he’d just turned forty—until one day he finds himself, quite by accident, stuck. In a little town called Specter. Specter, a town somewhere in Alabama or Mississippi or Georgia. Stuck there because his car has broken down. He has his car towed to a mechanic, and while he waits for it to be fixed, he decides to take a walk around.
Specter, not surprisingly, turns out to be a beautiful little town full of small white houses, porches and swings, beneath trees as big as all time to give them shade. And here and there are flower boxes and flower gardens, and in addition to a fine-looking Main Street there’s a nice mix of dirt, gravel, and asphalt roads, all of them nicely drivable. My father takes special note of these roads as he walks because, more than anything else, this is what my father loves to do. Drive. Past things. To get in cars and drive down roads all over the country, all over the world, to drive just as slowly as the law will allow—although the law, especially as it pertains to speed limits, is not something Edward Bloom respects: twenty in town is too fast for him; the highways are madness. How can the world be seen at such speeds? Where do people need to go so badly they can’t realize what is already here, outside the car window? My father remembers when there were no cars at all. He remembers when people used to walk. And he does, too—walk, that is—but he still loves the feeling of an engine rumbling, wheels rolling, the display of life framed in the windows in front and back and on all sides. The car is my father’s magic carpet.
Not only does it get him places, but it shows him places. A car . . . he drives, is driven, so slowly, and takes so long to get from here to there that some of his important business deals are done in cars. Those who have appointments with him follow this procedure: they find out where he is on this or that day, and figure that, being such a slow driver, he will remain in the general vicinity for most of the rest of the week, then they fly to the closest airport and rent a car. From there they hit the road and drive until they catch up with him. They will drive up beside his car and honk and wave, and my father will slowly turn—the way Abraham Lincoln would have slowly turned if Lincoln had ever driven a car, because in my mind—in the memory that has lodged itself imperturbably in my mind, my father resembles Abraham Lincoln, a man with long arms and deep pockets and dark eyes—and he waves back, and pulls over, and whoever needs to speak to him gets in on the passenger side, and this person’s deputies or lawyers will get in
the back, and as they continue to drive along these beautiful wandering roads their business is done. And who knows? Maybe he even has affairs in these cars, romances with beautiful women, famous actresses. At night a small table is set between them, covered in a white tablecloth, and, by candle light, they eat and drink, and make frivolous toasts to the future . . .
In Specter my father walks. It happens to be a nice fall day. He smiles at everything and everyone gently, and everything and everyone smiles gently back. He walks with his hands clasped behind him, peering with a friendly gaze into storefronts and alleyways, and already by this time somewhat sensitive to the sun’s light, squinting therefore, which only makes him seem friendlier, and more delicate, which he is: he is friendlier and certainly more delicate than he seems, ever, to anyone. And he falls in love with this town, with its marvelous simplicity, its unadorned charm, the people who greet him, who sell him a Coke, who wave to him and smile at him from their cool porches as he passes.
My father decides to buy this town. Specter has that special somber quality, he says to himself, a quality not unlike living under water, that he can appreciate. It is a sad place, actually, and has been for years, since the railroad was shut down. Or the coal mines dried up. Or the way it seems that Specter has just been forgotten, that the world has passed it by. And though Specter did not have much use for the world anymore, it would have been nice to be part of it, to have been invited.
This is the quality my father falls in love with, and this is the reason he makes the town his own.
The first thing he does is to purchase all the land surrounding Specter, as a kind of buffer, in case some other rich, suddenly lonely man stumbles upon the town and wants to build a highway through it. He doesn’t even look at the land; he only knows that it’s green with pine and that he wants to keep it that way, wants what is, in effect, a self- enclosed ecosystem. And he gets it. No one knows one man is buying the hundreds of tiny parcels that are up for sale, just as no one knows it when every house and store in town is bought, one by one, over a period of about five or six years, by someone other than anybody somebody else knows. Not for a while anyway. There are people who are moving, and there are businesses that are closing, and these are not difficult to purchase at all, but to those who like things fine just as they are and who want to stay in one place, a letter is sent. The letter offers to buy their property and everything on it for a handsome price. They are not asked to leave, to pay rent, or to change anything but the name in which the house—every house—and store—every store—is owned.
Big Fish Page 9