Another Perfect Catastrophe

by Brad Barkley

  “Dad?” He jumps, turns toward me just as the lantern tilts away from him and out over the pond.

  “Billy, holy bejesus, what are you doing here?” The lantern tips and lands in the pond, burns a few seconds, then sinks.

  “I just talked to Laney. The watercolorist was giving her stage directions the whole time.”

  He nods, opens and closes his lighter. “That’s a shame. Shame you can’t just let it alone, either.”

  “Well. And you, what the hell are you doing out here?”

  “Oh, just that old paper trick I used to do. You know the one.”

  “Dad…that’s not the question exactly. It’s almost three o’clock in the morning.”

  He shrugs, snaps the lighter closed. “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “So you walk into the woods to do some stunt from twenty-five years ago.” I shake my head, noticing how cold I am. “You know, you might have a stronger case for Alzheimer’s than cancer.”

  He laughs, pulls a cigar from his pocket, and busies himself unwrapping it. Even in the pale arc-lamp light from the construction site, I can see his face flushing.

  “I just thought…we don’t have a hell of a lot to reminisce over. I thought this might fit the bill. Every Independence Day, we did these, remember?”

  “You’re reminiscing by yourself?”

  He chews his cigar. “I’m practicing.”

  I laugh. “Dad, we don’t have to reminisce. We can just visit and talk. That fits the bill fine.”

  He looks suddenly old, standing there in his boxers and satin jacket. He has a stack of newspaper at his feet, two of them half-folded into lanterns.

  “Well, listen,” I tell him. “You went to all the trouble. Go ahead and do another one.”

  He shrugs. “Not like you’re some little kid anymore,” he says. “It would just be silly.”

  “We’re out here at the self-storage site in our underwear, Dad. I think we’re a little past silly.”

  He shrugs again, twists up one of the papers, and lights it. We stand back to watch the pale orange shadows of flame like something alive inside the folds of paper, the tiny curls of smoke, and then the turning and slow lift as heat fills the lantern. It was always like a contest, to see if it could get airborne before it consumed itself. The night breeze catches this one and pushes it up and out across the pond, where it settles atop the Porta Potti, and something—chemical fumes, methane gas—draws the flame in a blunt whoosh that bursts down the roof vent and into the toilet area, the white fiberglass walls suddenly in X-ray, showing through veiny brown, like a giant paper bag luminary at Christmas. The explosion is small, relatively, and self-extinguishing—it kicks open the door, then is quiet, the vent pipe trailing smoke.

  The remaining papers at our feet scatter with the breeze out into the pond. We look at each other, the only sound a dog barking, far off.

  “Okay,” I say, “I guess I’m ready to sleep now.” I grin at him, my old man of a father.

  He grins back. “Conquering the world, one tiny shit house at a time.”

  By dawn, as on most any day of my growing up, Dad is off somewhere in the Vette, his cereal bowl and coffee cup left behind clean in the drainboard. I eat my cereal and punch the button to listen to Laney’s voice. Instead I hear Dad’s voice, overloud, the speaker crackling as he talks.

  “HE, BILLY KESLER, ISN’T HERE AT HOME RIGHT NOW, SO THIS IS HIS MACHINE. YOU CAN LEAVE A MESSAGE FOR HIM IF YOU LIKE …” A few seconds of silence, then, “BILLY, I UPDATED THIS TAPE FOR YOU … HOPE YOU DON’T MIND. IF YOU DO, CHANGE IT BACK.” I rewind all the way to the start, trying to find Laney’s voice, but it isn’t there to be found.

  I drive to the community college campus, where I share an office with a professor of heating and air-conditioning. I go to class, hand back a batch of papers two weeks late. I show a short movie of The Lottery and we talk about religion and I assign a paper I will collect sometime near the day I return the current ones. This one kid, Kenny Pecora, follows me back to my office, wanting to know what else he can do. He has been to the Writing Center every day, he tells me. This is his third C in a row, he could lose his scholarship. He blinks at me, his face pale and desperate. When he opens his mouth, his teeth are overly large and square, like Teddy Roosevelt in the old photographs, smiling behind his pince-nez.

  “I’m not mad at you, Mr. Kesler,” he says. His hair is cut so short I can see his scalp beneath it. He is wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt and for half a weird minute I am twenty years old again, a sophomore wearing the same shirt, standing in line for a midnight show of The Song Remains the Same. “I’m just really, really frustrated, you know?” he says, and I have a near impulse to say, “Let me tell you about frustration,” like I’m some cantankerous stereotype, a sour old man in a comic strip. But the truth is I’m a young man still, and most of what needs to be said to students never gets said. I never tell the ones I know won’t make it. Never tell the A students they are wasting their time in a place like this, never say that half of teaching is being skilled at bullshit, that problems with comma splices and topic sentences will not destroy their lives. Right now I could tell Kenny Pecora that one day I will see his name in an old grade book when I’m cleaning out files and I will remember his Teddy Roosevelt teeth and think, Oh, yeah…him, and wonder for about six seconds what became of him, but not care too much because nothing much will come of him, good or bad. I could tell him that he may have a wife who thinks he’s distant and takes off on him, and he may put his fist through the glass door of a toaster oven, or he may have a father who spends his retirement staging his own slow death, or he may frustrate a student with three Cs in a row because he has given up actually reading the papers. I could, but to what end? I used to be a good teacher and might be again, if I decided. Think of some high school jock, now old and fat and wearing out his ass on the couch, knowing he could, anytime he felt like it, get himself back into shape. Back into fighting weight. Hustle a mile or two around the block. Do a few bench presses. Get back into trim and the old corduroys. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after.

  I tell Kenny Pecora to hang in there.

  After class Dad swings by to pick me up in his Vette, and we head out to the Noah’s Ark construction site. He lets me drive, and I have to slide the seat way back from where he had it, noticing as I do how much thinner he’s become. For a second I consider the possibility that he really does have cancer, but even God doesn’t possess that much irony. Only enough to let someone’s wife move in with the instructor of the class she was taking because the marriage counselor advised her to find some interests that belong only to her. That she did.

  The ark is at the end of Cherry Hill Road, a project the local Baptist church is paying for with raffles and bake sales and the usual guilt. At the edge of town is a big, hand-painted wooden sign: WE ARE REBUILDING NOAH’S ARK! This is true, in a way, though I have trouble picturing Noah and his sons with a crane and steel girders and warning signs from OSHA, which this place has in abundance. As we pull up, we see a pair of workers in hard hats, sitting on the top girder eating lunch, like those old photos of New York City. Several other men lean on the hood of a truck, looking at blueprints.

  “There it is,” I say.

  Dad half stands, so his head pops out of the open top of the car. “I’ll be damned,” he says down to me. “You can just see what it’ll be like finished. Imagine old Noah fitting two of every animal inside there.”

  For a minute I give in to the story, trying to imagine it the way it was always shown in all those dentists’ waiting room kids’ Bible books. The ark is surprisingly compact, only about the size of a small office building, like it’s meant not to hold animals but maybe just a dermatologist and an accountant or two. When its finished, the paper said, they will hold Sunday school classes inside, with enough room left in the hull for a volleyball court.

  My father keeps looking, muttering to himself. “Took him a hundred and twenty years to do it, and his neighbors all
scoffed. ‘Old Noah, the flake,’ they’d say, ‘Noah the nutcase.’ But the man had him a vision, yessir. That he did.”

  I say nothing, wondering where all of this is coming from. The closest he has ever come to any kind of religion was forming the Tommy Kesler Society. All the time of my growing up, Sunday mornings for him meant three of his friends over for Bloody Marys and fishing shows on TV, while I slept in late hearing the mixed sounds of their hoots and whistles when the show’s host landed a big one, and my mother beating eggs and frying bacon in the kitchen. When commercials came on, they would click over to the television preachers and spend those three minutes making fun of their haircuts and neckties and weeping, before fishing came on again.

  My father shouts to the men looking at the blueprints. “Mind if we go up there? For maybe five minutes?”

  They look at each other. “Who the hell are you?” one of them says.

  “I’m Tommy Kesler.”

  The three of them stare, waiting for further explanation. When none is forthcoming, one of them shrugs and points to the signs posted on the side of the little trailer, with AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY written in big, red letters.

  My father slumps back down in the seat. “You know, your mother would have liked this. She was always a big Noah fan.”

  “She was? Mom?” This seems weirder than his own sudden interest in Bible stories. I can recall not one conversation about religion around our house, except when the Baptist church sent out one of their SWAT teams, who sat my mother down in the living room (Dad was off selling pools), handed her tracts and opened their Bibles, bludgeoned her with hell and eternity and my own little eight-year-old unsaved soul, hitting her over the head with it. When they left, she slammed the door, tossed the tracts down the coal furnace vent, and told me the only problem with full-immersion baptism was that they bothered to yank them back up.

  “Well, I’m guessing she was,” Dad says. “Who wouldn’t be?” The men high up finish lunch and begin working again, pounding thick hammers on the corners of the girders.

  My department chair leaves a note in my box saying he’d like a word with me, which means students have been complaining. Twice now, Kenny Pecora has not shown up for class. For once, I wish he had, because I spent the hour reading and talking about an Elizabeth Bishop poem, the one about the armadillo and the fire balloons in Brazil, which my father put into my head by torching the Porta Potti. For the first time in a good while, I actually paid attention to what I was saying.

  At home, as I pull up behind the Vette and get out of my car, I find a woman sitting on the front porch. She calls out “hello” and waves to me.

  “Can I help you?” I say.

  “No, I’m fine,” she says. I stand below her on the bottom porch step, looking up at where she sits in the glider. She is a handful of years older than me, a plump, round-faced woman, though pretty and dark haired. She is working a crossword puzzle in TV Guide, filling it in with a golf pencil.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Who are you again?”

  “Tommy didn’t tell you?” she says. “I’m Wendy, the home health care nurse.”

  “No,” I say. “Tommy didn’t.” I stand gawking at her, feeling stomach-punched. What if? I think. But no, he has pulled similar stuff before. The first month after he invented his cancer, he shaved off his eyebrows and rented a wheeled oxygen tank from a medical supply house.

  “Where is he, anyway?” I ask her.

  “I think taking a shower. He’s really a sick man, you know.”

  My heart wobbles. “Why do you say that? I mean, what’s your assessment?”

  She shrugs. “Well, he said he is. Who would lie about that?” She lifts a bottle from beside the rocker and takes a dainty sip of St. Pauli Girl. I take a good long look at Wendy the home health care nurse, wondering where in hell he has found her. She smiles and asks me if I know the name of Red Skelton’s lovable yokel, Clem something.

  I find Dad in the kitchen, his hair wet from the shower, cooking eggs and hash browns.

  “A home nurse?” I say to him.

  “You know, she has never been out to see the ark, either. It’s like New Yorkers, they live there forty years and never see the Statue of Liberty.”

  “Dad…”

  “Toast or English muffin? Wendy took me to the store. Well, I took her, but same thing. You got another letter from the lawyers.”

  I shrug. “Why do you think you need a nurse? And what kind of nurse drinks beer at three o’clock in the afternoon?”

  “I asked her to drink beer with me. Part of her job. That and watch some TV, a few hands of hearts, a shoulder rub or two.” He folds the omelet, then flips it in the air.

  “She isn’t a nurse, is she, Dad?”

  “If you mean the Good Housekeeping seal of some university big-shot degree, then no. But ‘nurse’ is just a function, Billy. A plumber could be a nurse, a cowboy or a baker could, too.”

  “Or a contractual college instructor,” I say. I see what he’s up to: he wants to shame me into letting him stay on, into midnight reminiscences, into feeling sorry for him in his relatively old age by hiring someone when I fail to do it.

  “Hey, who’s making dinner here? Who cleaned the house today, you or me?”

  “So where did you hire your nurse? From the local bakery or the local cattle drive?”

  He flips his omelet, twice this time, catches it, slides it out onto a plate. “She works for an escort service. But it is just escort, Billy, no hanky-panky.”

  I shake my head and half laugh. “Dad, this whole thing is hanky-panky.” I help him butter the toast.

  He looks around the kitchen. “What whole thing?”

  “Your reason for coming here, your cancer. All just more of your stunts. Problem is, I’m not really entertained by it anymore.”

  “So I come here to make amends, and this is how I’m treated.”

  “I don’t want you to make any amends,” I tell him, and it’s true. What’s the point? Everyone has amends to make, so no one does. They all cancel each other out.

  Just then Wendy walks in and opens the refrigerator for another beer. “Kadiddlehopper,” she says.

  I look at her. “Pardon?”

  “That was the answer. On the crossword.” She is a little bit drunk. Dad finishes fixing the plates and we sit on the counter barstools to eat. We don’t say much. Wendy continues writing in the answers to her puzzle. Finally Dad interrupts the scrape and ring of silverware.

  “Wendy, tell Doubting Billy here your opinion of my condition.”

  “Dad…”

  “Well,” she wipes her mouth, slips the pencil behind her ear. “Your Dad is not well, Billy.”

  “Is that an official diagnosis, or did you find that in TV Guide?”

  She laughs, her face flushing deep red, then retrieves her pencil.

  Dad sets down his fork, folds his hands. “You want to call my doctor, smart guy? I’ll give you the number.”

  I look at the shadow of dark ringing his head as his hair grows in, sunburn peeling the tops of his ears, the hard set of his mouth. “Yeah, I would like to do that. Give me the number. Does he have a name, or do you need to think about it some?”

  He borrows Wendy’s pencil and writes a number down on his napkin, still looking at me. “Dr. Snelson,” he says. “You’ll be sorry.”

  Wendy holds up her hand for us to be quiet. “‘Early-TV pie guy, Soupy blank,’” she says, reading from her puzzle. “Does anyone know?”

  An hour later I’m sitting on the bed with the cordless phone in one hand and the napkin in the other. Dad and Wendy are talking in the living room, where I left them watching some movie of the week, sitting on the couch drinking beer and holding hands like teenagers. I punch the numbers for Dr. Snelson and get his machine, a woman’s voice reminding me of regular office hours, telling me to go to the hospital if I need immediate attention, or to call the doctor’s pager if this is an emergency. I write down his beeper number, wondering br
iefly what the difference is between an emergency and needing immediate attention.

  Sitting there on my marriage bed, I start to punch in the beeper number but with one tiny swerve, a little joggle in my brain, instead allow my fingers to punch in the number for the watercolorist’s house. Laney picks up on the second ring.

  “I think my father has cancer,” I tell her.

  “Very funny, Billy. I said not to call, okay? I mean it. I’m trying to be decent about this.”

  “No, really. I think he really does have cancer.”

  She is silent a moment.

  “So you’ve talked to his doctor then, right?”

  I look down at the folded napkin. “Not exactly.”

  “What then?”

  I stop for a minute, trying to think what evidence I actually do have. “I had to move back the seat on the Vette when I drove it. Way back.”

  “Dammit, Billy—”

  “And he hired a home nurse. Sort of.”

  I hear her draw in her breath and let it out, and I can see from the sound of it the way it puffs her bangs up and away from her eyes. “You are two of a kind, you know that? And this is a new low, Billy. It really is.”

  “Laney—”

  “Listen, I didn’t want to go along with this, but Dennis installed caller ID for me and from now on if it’s you, I’m not going to pick up, Billy, okay? You understand me?”

  “Who’s Dennis?” I say. This is enough to make her hang up, which she does with the softest click of the phone.

  In the living room Wendy the home nurse is asleep on the couch with her head tipped back and mouth open, the TV muted, my father just sitting and looking at the faces on the screen.

  “I need to drive her home,” he stage-whispers to me.

  “Let her stay,” I say aloud. “She’s out anyway. Toss a blanket over her, and we’ll fix her pancakes in the morning.”