by Owen King
His father seemed even less like an actual physical being than usual. Sam was accustomed to Booth being way out there, in the deep background—undoubtedly conductive but invisible, like a satellite. To attempt to conceive of his dying was like imagining that gravity could die. “You want me to just—rent another father?” a voice in Sam’s head asked.
But he was dying; Mina had said it was stomach cancer, an untreatable mass in his guts.
■ ■ ■
Relations between Sam and his father had, over the last eight years, not so much broken off as petered away.
Months had elapsed before Booth returned Sam’s phone call of that rainy September night in 2003.
When contact was reestablished, his father explained, “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to call you back. I’ve had phone troubles. These cell-phone companies are merciless in their demands for payment. But how did the picture turn out? What happened? Please tell me that you let a little bit of light into the room!”
At the time, Sam was sunk too deep in his own sorrow to say what he really felt, which was “You had your chance. Your last chance. Now: die.” He would have liked to, but he couldn’t make the effort to execute his relationship with his father. Instead, he told Booth, “It didn’t turn out. End of subject. Don’t ask again.”
And Booth said, “Oh,” and Sam said, “Really. I mean it. Don’t ask me again,” and somehow, miraculously, his father listened, and didn’t.
A couple of years after that, once the cult of the film penetrated the mainstream media outlets—right around the same time, as it happened, Sam left Video Store to pursue a stimulating career in weddingography—Booth sent Tom Ritts as an envoy. “Your father wants to talk to you about what happened to your movie, buddy.” Tom was so ill at ease about raising the matter that he avoided Sam’s eyes.
“He shouldn’t try to do that,” Sam warned, and his godfather nodded and said no more. The message must have been conveyed, because his father never did mention Who We Are, not once, not to this day.
Booth had recently relinquished the Manhattan apartment that was his base of operations since the mid-nineties, and moved in with Tom, taking official possession of the guest room that his factotum had maintained for him for years. The money Booth made from voice-over work—such as the monster-truck rally pitch, for example—was apparently not bad. By all reports, he hadn’t been late on a child-support payment since Mina was in elementary school.
Still, his sister’s conception of Booth as some sort of rock struck Sam as either confounding or ludicrous, depending on the day. He never let himself get too curious, though. He couldn’t see how, at this late date, it could benefit anyone.
If the old man had undergone some sort of Awakening, he at least had been decent enough not to proselytize about it.
The only concrete sign of his reform was a card that had arrived in Sam’s mailbox in 2007. A late-seventies photograph of Orson Welles adorned the front of the card, the aging genius dwarfing a chaise longue and brooding over a backgammon board. Nothing was written inside, but it contained a money order for the amount of $587.34.
Hours elapsed before Sam registered that it was recompense for John Jacob Bregman’s prosthetic nose. Initially, he felt chastened by the payback, but after that, he was irritated, more with himself than Booth. Because it wasn’t as though his father had made Sam a great gift. All he had done was square a debt years after the fact. Sam went ahead and deposited the money, barely prevailing against the urge to use his cell phone calculator to figure what he’d been cheated of in interest.
Booth sent his son the occasional e-mail (from [email protected]), usually forwards of YouTube videos. (It had to be said, the old man had excellent taste in forwards; among other wonders, he sent Sam a video of a ragged black cat prowling around in a cage and, through the magic of CGI, reciting a portion of a Willy Loman monologue from Death of a Salesman, and it had been as moving as it was surreal.) Occasionally, a short “Just thinking of you” or a “Too long since we got together” missive found its way to Sam’s in-box. Usually, Sam didn’t respond. Why should he? He wasn’t thinking of Booth; he didn’t think it had been too long since their last get-together.
Their last face-to-face meeting had been Thanksgiving at Tom’s house, the previous year. Booth eulogized the turkey—“Let us remember him as the turkey he was, not the turkey he became . . . a turkey in full . . .”—which was pretty funny, and he also spoke of his thanks that all the people he loved were present. Sam shook his father’s hand, each attested that it was good to see the other, and the younger Dolan was back on the road before the second half of the Lions game.
Although he’d driven it hundreds of times, the pitted surface of the Taconic Parkway now seemed unfamiliar. Some brush along the side of the road split, and in a flash of brown and kicking hoof, an unknown animal—deer, dog, bear—disappeared, darting for cover.
It occurred to Sam that none of it would be happening if, instead of fleeing, he had gone home with Tess Auerbach, the nice, sad girl in the purple dress. They should have been having morning sex right then. If they were, he wouldn’t have been in the apartment for Mina to wake him up, Wesley and the vagrant would have been unharmed, and though Booth would still be dying, Sam wouldn’t have had to know yet.
Sam thought about all the times he’d wished his father didn’t exist and suffered a pang of remorse—and then felt defensive and angry, because how many times had Booth let him down?
What was wrong with him that he had enjoyed the awful Grand Guignol of a show about a man doomed to die in a little room? They played those horrible things over and over. Kenneth Novey was going to keep killing himself for eternity in syndication. It didn’t seem right, or fair. Why couldn’t they give the guy a happy ending? Why couldn’t a repairman came along and fix things, let Novey out, give him a chance to put his life back together?
Sam could feel himself bouncing around inside his own head, could almost feel the walls of his own skull:
Why shouldn’t Aldo be allowed to see the uncut Greed?
How could Booth be sick?
What did you do, anyway, when both of your parents were dead? Sam knew well what it felt like to go to the movies alone, to sit with empty seats at either elbow. It felt like you weren’t like everybody else, like you were strange.
It was all so hard to believe, let alone accept, and the best thing for everyone would have been a do-over, but the car was going forward, and Sam was going forward, and mile markers were passing by.
■ ■ ■
Sweat that had collected at Sam’s hairline trickled into his eyebrow. He flicked it away with a thumb swipe. “Do you mind if I turn the air-conditioning on?” he asked his sister.
It had been hot and overcast when they stepped outside and had become more so as they drove, the cloud cover thickening and darkening, while the dashboard temperature rose steadily to a reading of 85. They had been driving for an hour and a half; Hasbrouck was two exits away.
“The noise that guy’s head made when it hit the stone in the courtyard, God. It sounded like a tennis ball hitting a racket—that, like, pop. But meatier. I keep thinking about that sound. Somehow there’s no mistaking the sound of a head hitting stone, you know?” Mina chuckled. “Crazy.”
Sam found the dial, pushed it the wrong way—toward heat—and dragged it back the other way. The air came on, hissing cold from the vents. “Say that again? What you were saying before?”
“That pop the guy’s head made. The knife guy. When it hit the stone.”
Sam was cognizant of an odd euphoria radiating from his sister. Her boots were off, and she had put her bare feet on the dash, wiggling toes with black toenails to the music on the radio. For a portion of the trip, she had passed the time using a rag to polish the sword that she had taken from the madman in the courtyard.
Sam felt himself snap to somewhat. His sister was agitating him when he was already agitated. He punched off the radio. The car fi
lled with the low tick and grumble of the parkway’s patchwork surface.
“What are you doing?”
“Me? Nothing. Sitting.” Mina tapped the point of the sword against the passenger-side window.
“You assaulted Wesley. We left him under a mountain of shit. And you practically killed that guy in the courtyard.”
“Me? I practically killed him? You leaped onto his testicles.”
“I did not—”
“Yes, you did! You leaped on that bum’s balls when he was already down.”
The testicle crushing had been reflexive, and Sam felt horrible about it. He wasn’t even sure the man meant any harm. In the moment, it seemed like the vagrant had thrown the sword at Mina, and the next thing he knew, he was jumping on the guy’s sack. The second-to-last exit streaked by on the right shoulder—Hasbrouck was a mile. “It was instinct.”
“You did what you did. I did what I did. He could have shanked us both, you know.” Her note of affront was feeble.
He glanced from the road, thought he caught the flash of a grin before she twisted to look out the passenger-side window. “Mina. This is serious. Booth—”
In the console cupholder, his cell phone rattled.
There was this, too: Tess Auerbach had called at least six times, and Sam wasn’t picking up.
She was undoubtedly pissed, and with good reason. Sam yearned to placate her somehow, but he didn’t want to tell her that his father was sick, and although he would have been happy to apologize, he didn’t think that was what Tess wanted. What he thought she wanted was for him to hold still so she could dig her thumbs into his eyeballs for standing her up in such an obnoxious way. Sam also doubted that Tess would be assuaged by his admitting that it would have been better for everyone if things had gone as they ought to have gone—him, her, sex—and that, if given a second chance, he would make different choices.
Sam was ignoring the buzzing phone and, meanwhile, taking comfort where he could find it—in his vision of the different choice he would have made: him, her, sex, and none of this happening—for as long as he could keep his conscience at bay.
Mina had asked him why he wasn’t answering this Tess Auerbach person’s phone calls, and since Sam had told her it was private, his sister had been needling him. “Your girlfriend is persistent,” Mina said. “Did you give her an STD or what?”
That people reacted differently to crisis was a given; Sam wanted to be accepting, to be a big brother and an adult.
“She’s not my girlfriend. I know you’re upset, Mina, but cut it out.”
“Whatever. She’s totally your girlfriend.”
More from a desire to shut up his sister than to stop the ringing, Sam abruptly decided to bite the bullet. He snatched up the phone. “Listen, Tess, I know you probably—”
“Nah, dude. Nah. You got it wrong. This is Jo-Jo.”
■ ■ ■
“Oh, hey. What’s up?”
Up ahead, the Hasbrouck exit hooked off to the right. Sam piloted into the turn.
“What’s up? Oh, that’s comical.” Polly’s husband laughed. “What is up is: we got a problem, dude. Yah?”
“What? Is Polly okay?”
“Polly’s fine.” The telephone line buzzed faintly, like an insect trapped between screen and glass. “It’s you has got me worried, Sam.”
There was a famous photo of Jo-Jo snapped in the second before the collision in the 1998 World Series. Crouched in front of home plate at Yankee stadium, tree-trunk legs planted wide to absorb contact, catcher’s mitt extended with both hands, the ill-fated runner, Esteban Herrera, inches away. (The twelve-year-old batboy is beyond the frame—and only a few hours away from the first of several osteoplastic procedures.) Drenched in stadium light, masked, the Jo-Jo of the image lacked any identifying features except his eyes, which were the color of ashes. There was no moving a man with eyes like that. If you wanted to score, you’d need a pickax to break him apart.
So Jo-Jo knew.
“I’m not sure I’m following you, Jo-Jo.”
“I mean, you like to fuck men’s wives, yah? Dudes don’t like that shit, is the thing.”
The truth was, Sam didn’t like fucking other men’s wives, it was stressful and in bad taste, and he was immensely regretful. He cared about Polly, and he thought she cared about him, too, but clearly, things had gotten out of hand. They had been careless and cruel. But Sam’s father had stomach cancer, and as rightfully wounded as Jo-Jo was, and as unjust as it might seem, the whole matter needed to be tabled for the foreseeable future. In order of precedence, parental stomach cancer trumped adultery.
For a few seconds, Sam deliberated on how to compress this line of reasoning into the briefest, sincerest package. He sensed his sister, eyebrow raised, staring at him. They came to a stop in a line of cars at the tollbooth. He abandoned deliberations. “Jo-Jo, I’m sorry. We’re going to have to talk about this later. I’ve got my hands full here.”
“You’ve had your hands full, boy, yah? Full of my wife’s ass. Well, now I’m going to cut off your hands. I’m going to keep them. I’ve got a special box picked out for them, yah?”
Down through the rest of his life, Sam suspected he would remember that, once, while he gazed upon an idling silver Subaru with a Cornell bumper sticker, a man had sworn to cut off his hands and retain them in a special box. “Pardon?”
“You heard me, yah? I got this wooden chest. Real nice, like an heirloom. Polished wood. And I’m-a have your hands to put inside it. Saw them off, yah? It’s going to be ugly.”
“I really am sorry, Jo-Jo, and I can tell that you’re upset—”
“ ‘I’m upset,’ he says?”
“Jo-Jo, my father is sick and I can’t—”
“I don’t care. Maybe I’ll take your papa’s hands, too, yah? Since I’m starting a collection—”
That was enough. Sam knew he was at fault, and he knew he deserved to be berated, but Booth was dying, and Mina was acting bizarrely, and it was way too much.
“You know what, Jo-Jo?”
“What?”
“Eat shit. Eat shit in your stupid pin-striped GTO. Eat shit in the fucking—in the fucking Deutschland.”
“Oh, dude.” The man on the other end of the phone made a blowing sound. Sam laid on the rental’s horn; the guy in the silver Subaru was taking his time at the tollbooth. Jo-Jo kept repeating, “Dude, dude, dude, dude.”
“Don’t ‘dude’ me. I’m not your dude. You know what else? I fucked your wife the Red Sox way, and she loved it.” Sam clicked off and jammed the phone back into the cupholder.
Ahead of them, the Subaru started to move.
Mina cracked her knuckles. She cleared her throat. Sam refused to look at her, but he could hear her grin. “I didn’t know you were a baseball fan, Sam.”
He told her to give him a dollar, and she did. After the toll, they turned right onto Hasbrouck’s central thoroughfare, in the direction of Tom’s house.
The cell phone rattled again. Mina picked it up and peered at the digital readout. “Here we go. This time it is your girlfriend. The Tess person.”
2.
Having exhausted the horizontal bounds of his property, Tom Ritts had, like the ancient Babylonians, turned his ambitions skyward. The crawl-space attic where Sam had searched for salable items to raise cash for the movie had been opened up into two more bedrooms; atop these bedrooms, his godfather had stacked a loft and a fresh walk-in attic. The house’s walls and roofs rose above the surrounding trees like some sort of rustic parking garage. Beyond exorcising Tom’s boredom, these constructions had no purpose; Tom confessed that, having completed the third-floor additions, he rarely visited them because it was such a tiring climb.
The housing bubble had transformed Ritts Design and Construction from a merely successful business into a money-printing factory. (From 2003 to 2005, for instance, Tom’s crew had built not one but two castles in the southern Hudson Valley, one for a hedge fund magnate and one for the s
enior partner of a corporate law firm—actual castles, with actual parapets, actual drawbridges, and in the case of the hedge fund magnate, who had really blown his castle out, an actual oubliette.) It was this wealth that enabled Tom’s renovations and expansions, though the endlessly swelling house was clearly not a compulsion based on vanity. No one thought it was attractive; it spread upward and outward at sharp angles; you looked at it and imagined it ripping itself up from the ground, whirling and swiveling into a wooden Transformer.
But Tom just kept on building. Because that was the thing that he did—he built. Sam envied his godfather’s resolution. Tom had found his groove, and he believed it, and trusted it, and just let it play. Tom built.
Nothing was ever that simple to Sam. For years he had done his best to reduce his relations, to indurate himself against the unforeseen, and he felt like he had done a pretty fair job of it. It was never a groove, however, because there came the last sixteen hours, and here he was, skipping and scratching again. It was disquietingly familiar: the sense of ambush, the drive in uncertain weather . . .
What a fool he was, he thought once more, not to go home with her.
The immediately striking aspect of Tom’s house was the grand picture window that fronted the enormous sitting room off the front door. On bright days it filled with sunshine and shimmered like a magic portal. As they pulled up the driveway on that dim morning, the glass was pooled with blackness.