Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  So it was a surprise when he started receiving letters from his sister while he was in Vietnam. At that point they hadn’t spoken in he couldn’t remember how long. But it was nice to get mail, missives from a home front he couldn’t really imagine, a suburban idyll of Little League games and PTA meetings and Christmas caroling door-to-door in the snow. It was like she was trying to remind him of something he’d never known and therefore never forgotten but still, somehow, missed. When he returned to the States and headed underground she kept writing. Sylvie didn’t know what he was involved in, of course, didn’t even know specifically where he was. In his first letter, Dickie had told her that he was bumming around the country, picking up odd jobs, and she seemed to accept that, stopped asking anything further after one or two tries. Whenever he settled in a place for any length of time he’d send her a PO box number, and a few weeks later a letter would arrive. News about Frank and the kids, the weather on the East Coast. The correspondence was heavily one-sided, as Dickie’s letters back consisted of only a line or two, one of which was the new PO box number and the other a plea to keep writing. He never divulged anything. Father Bill would have appreciated that, after he’d recovered from the massive stroke caused by finding out Dickie was corresponding with a family member aboveground.

  The last letter arrived right after MAELSTROM came apart. Dickie was hurriedly sweeping the area for anything he’d left behind, getting ready to disappear again, closing out the PO box, when he found the familiar monogrammed envelope. Their father was not well, Sylvie wrote. He was living alone in Davenport, in the final stages of the dementia that had been decimating him for the last couple of years. He had rejected any of Sylvie’s help, had told her that he wanted to die alone. Sylvie refused to accept this, though, and thought that Dickie should find a way to finish out whatever he was doing and get himself to Iowa to help their father pass. That being her exact phrase, Help Dad pass, Sylvie imagining Dickie as a crossing guard, maybe, holding Jack’s elbow, leading him over to that opposite sidewalk in the afterlife.

  Under other circumstances he would have disregarded the letter, failing at one more thing in Sylvie’s eyes, but who was really keeping count at this point. In that moment, though, in the post office, getting ready to blow out of town, the letter arrived like a Get Out of Jail Free card, maybe literally. It was the escape route he’d been looking for.

  * * *

  He had arrived in Davenport on a muggy, overcast afternoon, walking out of the Greyhound station, duffel slung over his shoulder, hair unbrushed, teeth fuzzy, getting sideways looks from businessmen and stroller-pushing moms, getting clutched purses, wallet checks. A visiting envoy from what his father had called the bum-world, back before Dickie left for Vietnam, when they saw the yowling, hirsute protesters on the nightly news.

  He took side streets as soon as he could, headed down along the river as the sun began to drop behind the humpback arches of the Centennial Bridge. There were a couple of vagrant encampments on the edges of the water, homeless vets still in their combat boots, squatting around Sterno cans, passing bottles, fishing with string tied to sticks, Tom Sawyer–style. Dickie kept his distance, didn’t feel like getting rolled during his first hour in town. He wasn’t carrying much, but he did have a handful of pills wrapped in a ball of aluminum foil, the last of his Portland stash, and he had no interest in pushing what might be left of his luck.

  His father had lived in Davenport for the better part of the last decade. Dickie had no idea why Jack had chosen this place, if it held any meaning for him. It was possible that he’d picked it simply for its lack of personal history. It wasn’t Boston, where Sylvie and her family had settled. It wasn’t the air base in Oklahoma, where Dickie and Sylvie grew up, where their mother had stayed after the divorce, right to her final days.

  Jack’s apartment was in one of the bleaker sections of town, a few blocks from the river. Liquor stores and pawnshops and the musicians’ union hall, a small park with more broken glass than grass on the ground. At the end of the street was a squat brick housing project surrounded by various styles of fencing, most displaying human-size rips and holes. Jack’s building was on the far side of the projects, a walk-up above a used bookstore that Dickie had never seen open for business.

  The last time Dickie had been there, his mother had just died. He was eighteen and alone, suddenly, for real. Jack had been gone for a few years and Sylvie was at college in New England. Dickie didn’t seem to have much in the way of prospects, as a few of his teachers had helpfully reminded him when he was in class, which wasn’t often. Most of his friends were either in jail or starting to get drafted, so he figured he might as well beat Uncle Sam to the punch and enlist.

  A week before deploying to Vietnam, he’d gone up to Davenport to stay with Jack, sleeping on the daybed in the living room, drinking a lot, watching the news on TV. They hadn’t spoken much during that time, mostly just shared the space, trying not to rub each other the wrong way. On the day Dickie left, Jack drove him to the Greyhound station in the same white Ford Fairlane they’d had when they were all living together a decade earlier on the air base, Dickie finding chips in the dashboard plastic that he remembered from front-seat rides when he was eleven. Outside the bus station Jack had handed Dickie forty bucks and a carton of cigarettes, a gesture of such surprising thoughtfulness that Dickie had been left speechless, standing silent on the curb while Jack pulled the station wagon back out on the street.

  The bookstore was closed, no surprise. The darkened front windows displayed the same sun-faded copies of Johnny Tremain and The Red Badge of Courage that Dickie remembered from his previous visit. Inside the apartment vestibule there was a thick layer of wet leaves and what looked like a few months’ worth of utility bills and supermarket advertising circulars. The stairwell led up to two doors, one his father’s and the other a janitor’s closet, the jurisdiction of whoever kept up the building, which from the look of the place didn’t seem to be anyone. He tried his father’s door. Locked.

  He had hoped he wouldn’t have to knock. He felt that knocking would put him at a distinct disadvantage, waiting on the musty landing while his old man shuffled to the door. He just wanted to walk right in and start doing whatever needed doing, cleaning up, making his father something to eat, airing the place out. Avoiding the introductory formalities and any necessary explanation his physical appearance might require.

  No such luck. Unless he was going to kick in the door, he would have to knock. Dickie swore under his breath, tapped his knuckles on the thin wood. He ran his hands through his hair, smoothed his beard.

  No answer. Maybe he had arrived too late. Maybe the old man was moldering away on the daybed in the living room, or worse, in the middle of the bathroom floor, felled in mid–nature call. Seemed Dickie would have to kick the door in anyway. He took a step back and cocked his leg.

  He heard shuffling from inside the apartment, tentative movement, putting his door-break fantasies on ice for the time being. A couple of painful-sounding coughs, crackling with phlegm. Then a lock tumbling, another. The doorknob turned but the door refused to give, jogged back and forth and then finally pulled in, his father’s remaining strength surprising, more than a little intimidating. Then the old man’s face appeared above the chain, staring out from the space between door and frame.

  Jack had been forty when Dickie was born, but he had never seemed old, even when Dickie was a child and most of the other base kids had dads half Jack’s age. Jack could have kicked any of their asses, and hadn’t been afraid to say so. Here, though, looking out past the security chain, he seemed ancient. His cheeks were crosshatched with uneven gray stubble. His hair had gone gray, too, his military bristle thin and grown out, plastered across the crown of his head, standing at greasy attention in odd angles.

  Jack didn’t look at Dickie. He looked at Dickie’s cowboy shirt, the garnet glass buttons down the front, on the pockets. He had once been Di
ckie’s size, but now stood stooped and emaciated. Yellow crust flaked at the corners of his mouth, old food and spit. He looked like a POW, a man living in extreme conditions. Someone had finally captured Jack Ashby. His eyes were alert, though, dry and clear and moving quickly, scanning the rest of the vestibule, the staircase. The door slammed shut and Dickie heard some fumbling with the chain, and then the door opened again, his father frustrated, impatient, motioning Dickie in.

  The apartment was half lit, the gray day seeping through the few windows that had been left uncovered. The room was heavy with the smell of old newsprint and cigarettes, his father’s acrid Lucky Strikes. Something crunched under his boots and Dickie looked down to see dry cat food scattered across the floor. He looked farther into the dark corners of the living room to see pairs of feline eyes returning his gaze, blinking warily. How many cats among the stacks of newspapers and magazines? Hard to tell in the bad light. Blink, blink. Many.

  Jack took another look into the vestibule, then slammed the door shut and reaffixed the locks. He stood with his creased forehead pressed to the back of the door. Dickie knew better than to go to him, to assume the man’s weight, help him to the daybed. His father had always been violently opposed to any display of weakness, even more opposed to any display of compassion. Direct assistance had never been tolerated. Dickie could remember being six or seven and learning to ride a bike outside their house on the Oklahoma base—not even falling off the bike so much as unable even to get on, missing the pedals repeatedly, collapsing in a tangle of limbs and greasy chain while Jack stood in the open garage doorway and smoked and watched. Just a hand, here, Dad, would be great, little Dickie thinking as he tried to extricate his feet from the tire spokes. Just a quick lift under the arms would be appreciated.

  The man should not be standing. It was becoming clear to Dickie, the longer Jack leaned with his head pressed to the door, just what awful shape his father was actually in. The amount of effort it must have taken to rise from the daybed and make his way across the room to the door. The depth of his father’s determination was still a formidable and frightening thing. How long would they stand like this? Dickie could picture the sun dropping below the rooftops out the windows, time-lapse-photography-style, the day going gray and brown, streetlights flickering on, the moon rising and falling, the sun coming up over the river, and then a sequence of days, a long string of mornings and afternoons and black nights with the two of them standing in these same spots, waiting for Jack to keel over or finally gather enough strength to start the long walk back to the daybed.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jack said, jolting Dickie back to planet Earth, his voice the familiar Lucky Strike rasp, but far fainter, more strained. “Get me back over there before I fall on my ass.”

  * * *

  The most shocking thing was the old man’s weight, or lack thereof. His father didn’t eat, as Dickie soon discovered, couldn’t keep anything down except the occasional coffee cup of vegetable broth, so watered down it was more like weak tea. He was subsisting on cigarettes and Wild Turkey, which made trips to the bathroom a nightmare, Jack discharging, often uncontrollably, a watery brown substance Dickie couldn’t help but see as the last lubricant in his father’s body, what was left of the liquid that kept the gears turning.

  Sylvie’s letter had described Jack’s mental state, but Dickie was completely unprepared for the vagueness surrounding his father, a man who once functioned with diamond-edged precision, no gesture wasted, no word offered without specific intent. Now Jack lived in a glassy haze, talking to himself, to the room, conversing with ghosts, the specter of Dickie’s mother, Audrey, other names Dickie didn’t recognize. He would rage for hours, shouting in a shockingly strong facsimile of his old infamous bark, while at other times he turned inward, weeping into his cupped hands, skeletal shoulders shaking. When this happened, Dickie left him to his sadness, his regret, whatever it was, giving the man his space, cleaning up the kitchen or bathroom or carrying armloads of old newspapers down to the trash can on the corner.

  But no matter how cloudy Jack got, he always recognized Dickie. Jack had known him the second he’d opened that door. He’d seen through the beard, the hair, the extra weight. He’d looked at Dickie without surprise, as if their eventual routine had long been established, as if the time line moving forward also stretched back somehow, and Dickie had already been there a month or two. Maybe that’s what happened when you were losing your mind. Time worked both ways.

  2

  She went down to one knee, slowly lifting the camera to her eye, careful not to spook the kids on the post office steps. Focusing close on their hands, the dirt-smudged fingertips, the chewed nails, the passing of a half-smoked cigarette from the boy to the girl.

  If they saw her and didn’t run, she’d offer them a pack of cigarettes just to stay and do what they were doing, just to ignore her. She’d give them some money for food, the address of a youth shelter farther down Santa Monica Boulevard. But their awareness would change the photographs, make them self-conscious, posed, and so she kept as still as possible, trying to get a few good shots before they noticed.

  She knew when she had the pictures, could already see the developed frames floating in the chemical pans back in her darkroom, so she stood and signaled to the kids. She was still close enough to their age, relatively, that they didn’t immediately head for the hills. She joined them in the slim band of blue shade under the building’s overhang, asked their names, gave them the cigarettes, the address for the shelter. No telling what they’d do with the information. Nothing, probably. They’d keep sleeping wherever they were sleeping, doing whatever they needed to do for food and drugs. There were so many kids on the streets now, even more than when she’d arrived. Some days it seemed like they would overrun the place, that L.A. would become a city of runaways, some kind of ragtag kid civilization, lawless and wild, no adults allowed.

  “Hannah.”

  She turned at the shout to the faces passing on the sidewalk, in the cars waiting at the traffic light. Finally she saw Bert, grinning in his silver Mercedes, leaning across the passenger seat to the open window.

  “Leave those kids alone,” he shouted.

  Hannah smiled, called back. “What are you doing this far east?”

  “You call this east? We used to live further east than this. We used to think this was west.”

  “Are you lost?”

  “Slumming,” he said. “Pleasure, not business.” He glanced back up at the changing light. “We’ll talk soon. There’s something I want to ask you.” Bert lifted his hand in a wave, righted himself behind the wheel, gunned his engine through the intersection.

  Hannah turned back to the kids, but they were already heading the other way, bedrolls strapped to their shoulders, the girl lighting one of the new cigarettes and passing it to the boy, who inhaled and passed it back, their hands staying together after the trade.

  * * *

  Ten years earlier she had packed what she could carry from her Berkeley dorm room and walked down to the highway, stuck out her thumb, headed south. She had no rational explanation for this. It turned out that Berkeley wasn’t far enough from home. It was like an animal instinct, almost. Escape.

  She knew it was a selfish thing to do. She grappled with her decision even as she headed down the interstate to L.A. But she saw no other choice. She was afraid of the life unfolding before her, trapped with her mother and brother in the house in Oakland, their narrow, fearful existence.

  She had no idea what she would do once she reached Los Angeles. She had only seen the city in movies and TV shows, pictures in Life magazine. In their family its name was avoided like a blasphemy. Los Angeles was the last place her father had gone, the last landmark they had for him. When it was mentioned, even in passing, overheard in a newscast or a stranger’s conversation, it sent a dark current through her mother’s mood. So of course this was where Hannah ran, the o
ne place she knew Ginnie would never come to find her.

  It didn’t take long to make friends. She made friends before she was even out of the Central Valley, hitchhiking through the mountain pass and then down into Hollywood. There were kids like her everywhere. There was always a couch or a floor to sleep on. There was always someone who had a couple of bucks for something to eat. She tried not to overromanticize those memories. They were scary times, too, and hungry times, and filthy, really, Hannah cringing when she thought about some of the mattresses she slept on, the other kids she slept beside, waking with rashes and bugbite eruptions, red-and-white pustules along her legs and stomach.

  But she was free, and that was all that mattered. About two weeks after she’d left school she called her mother, collect from a pay phone outside a deli on Fairfax Avenue. Ginnie nearly hysterical, demanding to know where Hannah was. Hannah told Ginnie that she was in Los Angeles, she was living in Los Angeles now. There was silence on the other end of the line, and then Hannah said, I’m gone, Mom. I’m gone. You have to let me go.

  * * *

  Her father was the shadow over most of their arguments, the invisible spark for their anger. Hannah storming through the rooms of the house in Oakland, screaming over her shoulder, Ginnie shouting back from the hallway, the kitchen, while Thomas played with his trains on the living room floor. Hannah unsure if he was listening, if he could understand. Not caring until after the heat of battle, when the sadness set in, the guilt, and then she would sit with Thomas in his room, whispering apologies as he fell asleep.