Sure enough, the teller-a trim, middle-aged man with a self-assured air-licked his thumb and forefinger to enhance their adhesiveness, raised one of the checks to his lenses, and began to examine it.
Charlie tried to blink the horror out of his eyes. “My mom endorsed them to me.”
The man muttered something in reply that sounded like “Yes, sir” but just as easily could have been a dubious “Yeah, sure.” And continued his examination.
Hot acid jetted into Charlie’s intestines.
An eternity passed.
Finally the teller opened his cash drawer and withdrew $5,058.96, the value of the checks minus Lightning a$h’s 1.5 percent fee. Charlie’s acid ebbed and cool relief flowed in its place. The relief was mitigated by that blend of probability and superstition unique to horseplayers: You don’t want to be lucky before the starting gate opens. It’s that much less luck you’ll have when you need it.
The sky above the Big A grandstand was an ominous, scowling gray. It would have taken a meteor shower to divert Charlie’s attention from the oval. From the moment the stall doors banged open, Edith was a bullet. She finished five lengths ahead of the favorite. But two lengths behind a nothing chestnut named Hay Diddle, who won going away.
“There’s a reason you never hear of anyone getting rich at the track,” Charlie said to no one in particular as he crumpled his ticket. He left feeling heavier by a hundred pounds, the bulk of it melancholy and foreboding. On the stairs he used the handrail, the first time he could remember doing so, to counter the dizziness.
As the Q11 bounced him through potholes and back to Manhattan, the squeaky suspension sounded as if it were reiterating his exact thought: Now what?
He fantasized about staying aboard all the way to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and from there skipping town on the first Greyhound to Montana or South Dakota or someplace like that. He’d clear the damned horses from his head once and for all, then find steady employment, maybe go back to school at night and finish his college degree. Then he’d meet “her” and they’d buy the two-story brick colonial with a tidy lawn that had room for a swing set and sandbox. And he’d find a thrill less risky than the horses. Like skydiving.
Running now would only make things worse though. Grudzev’s men would bring the sand to one of Charlie’s friends.
Also, Charlie had tried fresh starts. Several times after a big score, he’d hopped a taxi straight to LaGuardia. But the Daily Racing Form was everywhere-once even at a beachside newsstand consisting of a milk crate nailed to a coconut palm. He developed a theory that money won at the track, like water to the ocean, found its way back to the track. Or, put another way: A gambler doesn’t make the same mistake twice. It’s usually nine or ten times.
His cell phone’s ring ended his rumination. The readout flashed a number he didn’t know, but the area code was 718.
Almost surely it was the Christmas Call.
As if today couldn’t get any better.
The holiday had been yesterday, but his father traditionally didn’t remember Charlie’s birthday until days afterward. If at all. Charlie used to go see him on the big holidays, at places that could get them fed and out in under an hour, with televised ball games to minimize conversation. The last couple of years, it had dwindled to just the calls.
The old man had some means; he could bail Charlie out of the Grudzev thing without much hassle on his end.
Writing Santa would be a better bet, Charlie thought.
Reflected in the window across the aisle was a face so cross that, for a moment, he didn’t recognize himself.
He let the phone keep ringing.
Walking to his apartment, where rent had been due a week ago, Charlie saw a Cadillac Eldorado idling in the handicapped spot. Sitting at the wheel was Karpenko. Forged in a part of Russia where men killed one another over as little as a dirty look, Karpenko was hardened well beyond his age of thirty-five. Word was he once shot a man just to make sure his gun was working. One look at him, at all his muscles and his sharp black goatee, and anybody would think, Satan on steroids. He had on a high-collared black leather overcoat, which actually made him less menacing; Charlie had seen Karpenko in warmer weather, when he’d worn just a tank top, displaying crudely rendered dragons and skeletons and other gulag tattoos.
Karpenko served as muscle for the man beside him, Leo Grudzev, a jack-of-all-criminal-trades whose favorites were small arms and narcotics trafficking and shylocking-his preferred term for high-interest moneylending. Not that Grudzev needed muscle. The forty-year-old’s keg of a torso was joined to a proportionately sized head by a neck that would have been indiscernible if not for the thick gold chain and gold cross the size of a railroad spike. He had a sour face that jutted forward like a ski slope. Charlie thought of Grudzev as evidence anthropologists were wrong-Cro-Magnon man hadn’t died out. Were Charlie to voice that, Grudzev probably would shoot him. If Karpenko didn’t shoot first.
Charlie steeled himself as he approached. Behind the steel were bones and tissue that fear had turned to putty. Grudzev’s window rolled down. Charlie was belted by musky cologne and garlic.
“Belated Merry Christmas,” Charlie said.
“Same for you,” said Grudzev through a thick Russian accent, “if… ”
Karpenko reached into his coat, probably for a weapon. The glint in his eye alone caused Charlie’s heart to jump.
Until Charlie hit upon a possible solution. “I have a plan to pay you by tomorrow with an extra five K on top,” he said to Grudzev. “And if I don’t, I’ll go down to Brighton Beach and eat every grain of sand there.”
Grudzev exchanged a shrug with Karpenko, then looked back at Charlie. “This plan better no got to do with a fucking horse.”
6
The Prospect Park Senior Outreach Center was done in so many cheery pastels that the overall effect was depressing, the way a clown can be. The liniment in the air didn’t help. Prior to pleading with Grudzev for a one-day extension, Charlie had listened to Helen’s voice mail message, called her back, and gotten the rundown. If it hadn’t included “durable power of attorney”-which would allow him to administer his father’s finances-he almost certainly wouldn’t be here now.
He almost didn’t recognize the man hunched on the couch across the lobby. Usually Drummond sat straighter than most flagpoles, a function of rectitude as much as posture. His hair threw Charlie too. Charlie had correctly anticipated that, in the time since he’d seen him last, it would have turned fully white. The shocker was that it was unruly; Drummond used to keep it close-cropped, and practically regimented, by a standing weekly appointment at the barbershop.
The pajamas also surprised Charlie-not so much because of the incongruity of pajamas in a public place but because he simply couldn’t remember having seen his father in nightclothes before. When Charlie used to get up for school, no matter how early, Drummond was gone. Often, the faint scent of talc was the only evidence he’d come home from the office the night before. More often, he was out of town, singing the praises of his beloved washers and dryers.
“Hey,” Charlie said.
Drummond looked up, and Charlie saw the biggest change in him. His eyes had always been clear, sober, and sharp. Now they were the eyes of a man gazing into deep space and without a flicker of recognition.
“Dad, it’s me,” Charlie said.
“Oh,” Drummond said pleasantly but without familiarity. “Hello.”
Charlie felt as if an icy finger ran up his spine. “Charles,” he tried.
Drummond looked him over, his eyes settling on the Meadowlands Racetrack logo on the sweatshirt peeking out of Charlie’s jacket. Charlie wondered if, subconsciously, he’d put on the sweatshirt to provoke the old man. Although Drummond dabbled in the horses, the track had been their undoing, specifically when Charlie wound up at the Big A instead of staying at Brown for his sophomore year. There was a track axiom Charlie thought perfectly summed up Drummond’s censure: “The gambling known
as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.”
Charlie decided now that the sweatshirt was merely a function of probability-a third of his wardrobe was racetrack giveaways.
“Charles!” Drummond exclaimed, as if aware of his presence for the first time. “What are you doing here?”
“Helen called-”
“The social worker?”
“She thought I ought to come pick you-”
“I see. Completely unnecessary.”
“She said that you-”
“No, no, I’m fine. Completely fine.”
“That’s not what-”
“It’s nothing you need to concern yourself with. Also, you should be in school.”
Charlie was given pause. “You don’t mean Brown, do you?”
“Clara Barton,” Drummond said as if the question were inane.
“I graduated from Clara Barton twelve years ago.”
Drummond rubbed his eyes. The vacancy remained.
“Oh,” he said.
7
Helen Mayfield could turn heads, Charlie thought. But she was about something else. Her sunny blond hair was styled to be no maintenance. She wore a smart suit, obviously plucked off a rack, though, and not tailored in any of several ways that would have played up her figure. Her face was pale yet only cursorily made up. She was fully focused on helping others, he decided, and while not a practitioner himself, he admired it. Unfortunately, he thought, she was out of his league. And out of the league above that one too.
While Drummond dozed in a chair out in the hallway, Charlie and Helen sat at her desk, trying to talk above the Seniorobics class next door.
“Alzheimer’s sufferers your father’s age are a rarity,” she said in a tone that was at once professional and compassionate. “Those his age already exhibiting his range of symptoms are statistically nonexistent. It’s simply unfair.”
She appeared to study Charlie to determine whether he needed a fortifying hand or a hug. He felt no worse than if Drummond were a stranger-some pangs but nothing that would trouble him tomorrow. Maybe it was denial. Maybe something was wrong with him. Maybe it was just the way things were. He lowered his eyes only because it seemed appropriate.
“So I guess a couple of aspirin isn’t going to do the trick here,” he said.
She smiled. “There are a number of Alzheimer’s medications. Sadly, the best only slow cognitive decline, when they work at all. The neurologist will fill you in.”
“What’s a good-case scenario-if there even is one?”
“You might get lucky with donepezil or galantamine. Also you can expect some episodes of lucidity at random-sometimes five or ten minutes long, occasionally several hours. Still, the overall scheme of things is like child development in reverse. He’s going to need full-time supervision now. I imagine you’re too busy with your life to be his caregiver?”
“Something like that.”
“What about other family?”
“They won’t be much help. None of them are still alive.”
She laughed, seemingly despite herself. “In that case, assisted living is probably the best option. It’s not easy to find a suitable facility, in terms of the quality and quantity of staff, among other criteria. I’d be glad to help you.”
“I’d appreciate that,” he said, thinking of the time he’d get to spend with her. Left to his own devices, his criteria would be that the nursing home smell wasn’t too bad and that his father could foot the bill. After Grudzev got his cut.
“Do you drink beer?” she asked.
He considered his response. Did she smell the Big A on him? Were his eyes bloodshot? Had she otherwise pegged him as a resident of Fringeville, meriting a call to the Durable Power of Attorney Department with a recommendation that they ink up the big rubber Hell No stamp?
“Sometimes,” he said.
“Same. When we go over facilities, maybe we could have a beer?”
Charlie couldn’t calculate the odds of this turn. He reined in his jack-o’-lantern grin lest it cause her to reconsider. “Maybe we could each have a beer?” he said.
From the sidewalk across the street, Dewart aimed a surveyor’s level at the Prospect Park Senior Outreach Center. Most of his face was masked by the raised collar of his Dept. of Housing parka, along with his sunglasses, hat, and earmuffs. If someone still recognized him as one of the grad students rooming nearby, he had a story ready: He was moonlighting as a building surveyor to help with tuition.
The surveyor’s level concealed a laser microphone. Directed at a second floor window, it measured vibrations in the pane and electronically converted them to the son’s conversation with the social worker. The good news: Drummond had been located.
Hoping to ascertain that Drummond’s disappearance had been benign, Dewart listened to the conversation through headphones concealed by his earmuffs-or rather, he tried to. Despite filtration software designed to eliminate ambient noise, he couldn’t differentiate their words from the disco music blaring from the room next to her office.
8
Probably the biggest misconception about Brooklyn was that it lacked trees. Smack in the middle of the city was a two-hundred-acre forest-and that was only a fraction of the flora in Prospect Park, the masterpiece of the landscape designers Olmsted and Vaux, better known for one of their quicker jobs, Manhattan’s Central Park. The treetops came into view above and between the buildings as Charlie walked Drummond out of the senior center.
“An interesting piece of information is that there are one hundred and fifty species of trees in Prospect Park,” Drummond said. Once, he was a spigot of “interesting pieces of information,” which, Charlie always thought, should have been billed only as “pieces of information.”
Drummond was a shell of his old self, and out of whack in general, but the hour-long nap outside Helen’s office seemed to have energized him. His eyes were clearer and there was vitality to his step-taken in shoes a half size too large, procured by Helen, along with a woolen overcoat.
“Say, let’s let the taxicabs go on past and walk home through the park,” he said. “It’s such a nice afternoon.”
It was dreary and forty degrees tops.
“Great idea,” said Charlie. He would have agreed to do just about anything in order to capitalize on Drummond’s relative and possibly fleeting coherence. He needed him to sign the boilerplate durable power of attorney document hot off Helen’s laser printer.
Drummond spun abruptly and stared at a Department of Housing worker a half block behind them. The man was gazing into a pizzeria.
“Do you ever have the feeling people are following you?” Drummond whispered to Charlie.
Charlie had learned from Helen that paranoia was to Alzheimer’s what sniffles were to a cold. “When I’m getting on the bus,” he said.
Seeming to have forgotten all about the man, Drummond turned and resumed his course to the park. “Ah, a sycamore maple!” he said, pointing at the branches spilling over the gate.
In summertime, when attendance peaked and with the musicians, jugglers, and balloon sellers in full force, entering Prospect Park at the Flatbush and Empire gate was like walking into a parade. Now, as Charlie bought a pair of hot dogs and he and Drummond settled onto a bench to eat them, the crowd was limited to the lonesome vendor, a homeless man perched on a wall blowing into fingerless gloves, and a trio of construction workers quietly sipping cans of beer wrapped in paper bags.
A young father and a beaming little boy passed, hand in hand, probably on their way to the playground or the zoo or the carousel. Charlie was reminded how badly he’d wanted to go to those places as a kid. Drummond took him only to the historic house, where the butter-churning demonstration was as fun as it got.
Charlie tasted the same bitter regret now, which made broaching the topic of institutionalizing his father no harder than asking him to pass the ketchup.
“Dad, I think you’d do well to live somewhere with pe
ople to look out for you.”
Drummond happily tore open his third ketchup packet. “Why is that?”
“You remember the business with the Meals on Wheels van, right?”
Drummond was focused on squeezing the ketchup onto his hot dog. Charlie felt like he was talking over a lousy long distance connection.
“Meals on Wheels, Dad?”
“Right, right. I suppose that in another culture, I’d be shoved out to sea on an ice floe about now, correct?”
Charlie hadn’t anticipated nearly as much awareness. He hurried to unpocket the document. “Signing this gives me your power of attorney.”
“That’s reasonable, I suppose. What do you have in mind for me?”
“Helen recommended a few assisted-living residences.”
“Eh. Those places are just waiting rooms for the cemetery.”
“I’m not so sure about that.” Charlie opened the manila envelope Helen had given him. “I personally would be delighted to move into any of these.” He passed four brochures to Drummond, who grudgingly accepted.
They could have been mistaken for glossy advertisements for resorts, and the names would have done little to correct the misimpression-the Greens at Four Oaks, Mountain View Lodge, the Orchard, Holiday Ranch. Each brochure brimmed with striking, full-color photo graphs of ascendant suns igniting dewy fairways, hiking trails through forests at the blazing peak of New England autumn, and lakes that outshone most gems. Only Holiday Ranch hinted on the cover that it was a senior citizens facility, billing itself as “An Active Retirement Residence!”
“According to Helen, Holiday Ranch is incredible across the board,” Charlie said. “But the really incredible part is they’ve just had an opening, which hardly ever-”
“What I want is to go to Switzerland,” Drummond cut in. He pushed the brochures away as if they were junk mail.
“Switzerland?” Helen had said that Drummond initially thought he was in Geneva. As far as Charlie knew, Drummond had never been to Europe. Also Charlie couldn’t recall him ever mentioning Switzerland, save a purportedly interesting piece of information about cheese. “What is it with you and Switzerland?”
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