Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

by Sweany, Brian;

  I even pause at the descriptions that have nothing to do with his injuries, the ones that talk about Dad as if he was a healthy man, as if he has every reason to still be alive.

  He had a great heart: “no softening and/or mottling of the myocardium due to recent myocardial infarction or necrosis…no myocardial fibrosis…no myocardial contusion…no defects in the arterial or ventricular septa.”

  His vascular system was that of a man half his age: “no evidence of aneurism, coarctation, dissection, or laceration of the aorta…renal arteries are not stenotic.”

  He had the lungs of a lifetime non-smoker: “trachea complete, without malformation, from the larynx to the carina…lungs and hilar nodes not significantly anthracotic and no emphysema.”

  He wasn’t even close to brain-dead: “no hemorrhage in the scalp or galea…no evidence of herniation at any of the portals of the brain…no internal evidence of contusion, edema, hemorrhage, tumor, atrophy, infection, or infarction in the cerebrum, cerebellum and brainstem…craniocervical junction demonstrates a usual range of motion.”

  His brain, his heart, his lungs, his “genitalia of a short foreskin male adult”—hell, even his prostate—were all given clean bills of health. Then why the fuck isn’t he here? Why isn’t Dad here to take Jack trick-or-treating or to tell Mom, “Debbie, nobody eats ham on Thanksgiving”?

  “Well?” Mom takes the autopsy report, flips it face down on the table.

  I back away from the table, a little teary eyed. I stand up, already trying to distance myself from the words. “That’s not something I care to ever read again.”

  Mom smiles. A full-on fucking smile! She pours some Rose’s Lime Juice into the glass. She shakes the glass, mixing the lime juice with whatever is left of the vodka and melted ice mixture. “Two hundred and thirty-one.”

  “What?”

  “Your father’s weight.” Mom finishes her drink. “The autopsy report said he weighed two hundred and thirty-one pounds.” She opens the report face up again and turns to page two. She points to where it says, “The body is that of a well-developed white male adult appearing the stated age of 46 years. The body length is 72 inches and the body weight is 231 pounds. Scalp hair is gray.”

  Mom is still smiling. In fact, she’s laughing.

  “You okay?” I say.

  She finishes off her gimlet. Still laughing. “That son of a bitch told me he was one ninety-five.”

  I smile, laughing with her now. I see Dad eating his nightly chocolate-covered ice cream bar he’d have about an hour after dinner, even if he already had dessert. After he ate it, he’d lie on the couch for hours at a time until one of us got up, just so he could hand you his chewed-up ice cream stick and say, “You mind throwing that away for me, champ?”

  I don’t second-guess this unexpected gift of humor. Given these last few months, laughing at my father’s autopsy makes sense. Mom finishes her gimlet. “I know why you were upset with Mitch.”

  “You do?” I say.

  “Sure I do. He slept around on Ophelia with other men. You and John knew, but you never told me.”

  “Dad told me when we went to the Bahamas,” I say. “Nobody wanted you to know. It’s like we all unconsciously decided to protect Uncle Mitch, which if you ask me was disgusting.”

  “We all make mistakes, Hank.”

  “Please don’t tell me you’re defending him.”

  “Nobody’s perfect,” Mom says. “You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. Kids coming into my office, struggling with their sexual identities. I feel sorry for him.”

  “I feel like he’s a demon that needs to be exorcized from this fucking family.”

  “Well, you’re going to need to confront those demons at some point.”

  “Come again?”

  “Uncle Mitch is moving back to Indiana. He’s looking at apartments in Empire Ridge.”

  1993

  Chapter forty

  I look in the bathroom mirror. I run my hands through my hair, lamenting my more salt than pepper coif. My wife walks into the bathroom. She begs me not to go into work. I’ve been fighting a stomach bug so bad I’ve already thrown up twice this morning. “I’ll be fine, Debbie. I need to get up to the auction and buy some cars to build up our used inventory. I’ve told you before, that’s where we make our best margins.”

  I kiss my wife goodbye, tell her I love her. She doesn’t say it back.

  When I get to the Indianapolis Auto Auction, I bypass the usual meet and greets with other area car dealers. I sneak into the restroom. I’m sweating and more than a little lightheaded, still fighting the nausea. That large black coffee I just finished off on an empty stomach isn’t helping things. Maybe Debbie was right. Maybe I should have stayed home. My stomach churns. I feel like I might throw up again. I hover in the restroom. Spending even an extra five minutes hunched over a toilet could mean losing out on a deal. I swallow, forcing the acid back down my throat and into my stomach. I wash my hands, then wipe my face with a wet paper towel.

  I exit the restroom, managing to trade a few handshakes and smiles. I grab another cup of coffee, plus a donut to try and settle my stomach. I check my watch. I step onto the auction floor, noticing the white GMC Sonoma pickup truck.

  A wholesaler from Nashville flags me down. He’s standing beside the auctioneer. “You like this, John?”

  “I sure could use some trucks on my lot, Bill.” I shake the wholesaler’s hand. I walk to the back of the pickup, run my right hand along the tailgate, my coffee in my left hand. I take a sip.

  It’s 8:30 a.m. “Move ‘em up, move ‘em up!” the auctioneer shouts into the microphone.

  I hear a high-revving engine behind me and the sound of tires squealing. I look over my shoulder and see the black Ford Bronco barreling into the garage.

  Two bodies go flying like bowling pins. The Bronco is coming for me.

  I drop my coffee, reach down with my right hand, trying to muster some superhuman feat of strength that might prevent the Bronco from hitting me. I close my eyes, feel the splintering pain of my wrist being crushed into a mash of skin and bones. I hear the screaming, the crashing sound of metal hitting metal, the audible cracking noise of my own pelvis being crushed. I smell the burning rubber.

  I can feel the Bronco and the Sonoma colliding inside me, my groin being ripped in half. My liver exploding. The outer wall of my abdomen, my bowels, and my bladder all shredded and expelled in bits and pieces onto the reddening concrete floor. The combined wreckage of my body and the two vehicles slide six feet across the freshly painted floor. Cold steel and fiberglass tear through my skin.

  A sick, desperate sound exits my throat. I start gargling and choking on wet mouthfuls of blood. The driver of the Bronco appears dazed. The Bronco is still in drive, wheels spinning, the bumpers of the two vehicles grinding away at the few tendons keeping my body from being cut clean in half. People are shouting at the driver, “Turn it off! Turn it off!”

  Someone reaches into the open driver’s side window of the Ford Bronco, grabs the keys and cuts the engine. I slump over the hood, arms spread. Out of the corner of my eye, a man picks my cell phone off the ground, pockets the phone, and disappears into the crowd. The wholesaler from Nashville grabs me right before I fall, lays me on the floor. He holds my hand as I gasp a few stubborn breaths.

  And then nothing.

  “So…” Hatch says. “You’re telling me you dream about taking the place of your father in the accident?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “And that’s the same dream you’ve been having every night for the last three months?”

  “Yep.”

  “Holy fucking Christ, Fitzy.”

  The bartender gives us our usual, a pitcher of Natty Light and two glass mugs. He pours the first glass for me, salting the cocktail napkin before he puts down the glass,
an old bartender trick to keep the napkin from sticking to the bottom of the glass. His name is Shane Estes, owner and proprietor of Shane’s Pub. The night of Dad’s funeral, Laura dropped me off here and Shane kept the bar open until I was done drinking. “We close when you close,” he said to me.

  Hatch leaves with the pitcher and his mug. “Thanks, Shane.”

  Shane wipes the wet circles off the bar where the pitcher and mugs used to be, his lone distinctive feature an oily, untrimmed mustache. “Happy New Year?”

  He says this in the form of a question. I’ve learned people don’t necessarily want you to be happy. They want to think you’re happy. “Yeah, Happy New Year.”

  Hatch and I have spent half the day helping Mom move the last of the boxes from the old house. I hate the new house. Yeah, living in the old house was like dipping an open sore in a pile of salt on a minute-by-minute basis. But that was preferable to a brand new house—heartless, soulless, smelling of latex paint and a family running away from something.

  Tonight is the last weekend night before people start heading back to school for the ’93 spring semester. Hatch and I occupy the table by the jukebox.

  “You need to stop reading that autopsy,” Hatch says. “That shit is going to fuck with your head.”

  “I think it would help if Mom stopped reminding me how Dad had the stomach flu the day he was killed and she almost talked him into staying home that morning.”

  “Yeah, that would help.”

  “The deposition is almost as bad.”

  “The deposition?” Hatch says. “Of who?”

  “The guy driving the Ford Bronco that hit Dad.”

  “You’ve read that, too?”

  “We got it from our attorney just this morning. We’re pursuing a wrongful death lawsuit against the auto auction. The deposition is pretty graphic.”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  I ignore Hatch. “It reads like a fucking conspiracy to kill my father. You got this Ford Bronco that breaks down like a half-dozen times while waiting in the repo line. The general manager of the auction tells his driver, this dim-witted retiree who doesn’t have a driving record so much as a rap sheet, how to feather the gas and the brakes together so they can at least get the Bronco to the auction block. Next thing you know, the driver panics, stands on the gas, and cuts my—”

  “Jesus, Fitzy. What part of ‘I don’t want to know’ did you not understand? Shut the fuck up!”

  God love him, Hatch has struggled being a real human being since Dad was killed. He was supportive early on, but his default assumption now seems to be that my life is like a sitcom in which you forget the dead parent after the pilot episode. Five minutes and twenty-two seconds into the show, Mr. Brady has the one conversation with Bobby about hiding his mother’s picture. “I don’t want you to forget your mother, and neither does Carol,” Mike says. “Gee, that’s swell,” Bobby says. And everyone is peachy fucking keen for the rest of their lives; well, at least until the episode where Mr. Brady dies of AIDS.

  We empty the pitcher in short order. Hatch stumbles back toward the bar, ostensibly to get more beer but more likely to flirt with Claire, who just walked in. I do my best to mingle, but it’s more just a disinterested shuffle through the slurring, ash-scented masses. I try not to trip over the bad pick-up lines.

  Left-hand wrapped around the handle of my empty beer mug, I tap the soft pack of Marlboro Lights on my left wrist. I knock a cigarette loose until it extends halfway out the pack. Extracting the cigarette with my left thumb and index finger, I bring the cigarette up to my mouth and light it with a Bic lighter I stole off the bar. Tired lungs inhale until it burns as I hover over the jukebox. It plays “Family Tradition” by Hank Williams Jr., as it does once every third or fourth song on any regular Shane’s Pub playlist. With the obvious exception of the Mellencamp library, few songs get Empire Ridge locals into more of a drunken lather than this stupid fucking song. The waitress identifies me by name, tells me the jukebox is paid through the next seventeen songs. I give her a smile and a nod, pretending I know her.

  “Got one of those for me?”

  I turn to the familiar voice coming from the dart room. “For you, Ms. Burke, anything.”

  Beth smiles and slides her arms around me. She gives me a long, drawn-out hug, one of those hugs in which you squeeze almost too hard and for too long, your eyes closed, until people start staring and you end with rubbing each other’s backs as if to affirm the sincerity of the gesture.

  We separate. I hand Beth a cigarette, lighting it, and stare at her eyes.

  Beth stares right back at me, holding the cigarette between her left middle and index fingers and raising it to her mouth. She inhales to get it started, blowing smoke out the side of her mouth.

  Her eyes guide me to the table beside her. A pitcher of beer and a stack of plastic cups stand watch. Beth nods. “Want to sit down? I got next on darts, but it looks like it’s going to be awhile. I could use the company.”

  “Sure.”

  Beth is still the coolest girl I know. She’s come out of her shell in the last couple years, striking a balance unique in the Empire Ridge female population—nice and refined when she has to be but prone to cussing, chain-smoking, and out-drinking guys twice her weight when refinement is neither mandatory nor preferred. She’s one of those women oblivious to how fucking hot she is, unafraid to go out to a bar wearing loose-fitting jeans, wool socks, and Birkenstocks.

  The fact she’s both hot and smart is what made her decision to date Hatch such a curious lapse in judgment.

  Granted it was a fling to Beth and something more to Hatch. I still remember how he went all out: three months of dinners and roses, multiple mix tapes—with narration!

  “Beth, love will find a way.” (Cue Tesla.)

  “Beth, you kickstart my heart.” (Cue Mötley Crüe.)

  “Beth, what can I do?” (Cue KISS.)

  I was insanely jealous. Of course, I never let on about my jealousy. Even when Hatch went into graphic detail about Beth’s flexibility in the sack or her prowess at giving blowjobs. Even when Mom and Dad headed to South Carolina for a week and Hatch kicked me out of my own house for an entire weekend just so he could nail Beth in my parents’ bed.

  Beth came to her senses eventually, dumping Hatch at summer’s end. Hatch broke down and cried about it on multiple occasions. On the record, I was a loyal and steadfast friend, telling Hatch things like “You deserve better than that,” and “She doesn’t know what she’s missing.” Off the record, I was damn near exultant that the overachieving fucker’s three months of nirvana were over.

  “How you holding up?” Beth wraps her arm behind me and rubs my back again, exhaling a puff of smoke.

  “Been better.” I hunch forward, as if I can hide from my grief.

  “Yeah.” She leans in, dropping her chin on my shoulder. “Did you know I bought my first real car from your father?”

  I sip my beer. “Who didn’t?”

  “Laura, too?”

  Beth still spits her name more than she says its. It used to bug me. Now I find it attractive. I nod. “Yep, Laura too.”

  “I bet I got a better deal,” Beth says. “When I got a full ride to Illinois, my dad said I could spend my college fund on a new car.”

  “And you picked an Oldsmobile?”

  “Who said anything about an Oldsmobile?” Beth grabs my forearm. “Why would any self-respecting girl drive an Oldsmobile?”

  “Uh, Laura drives an Oldsmobile.”

  Beth’s eyes say to me, I rest my case. “Your father hooked me up with a Fiero. Said he got it for a song from a Pontiac dealership that went out of business and couldn’t with a clean conscience sell it to me for anything more than cost. I’ll always have that memory of your father. He was one-in-a-million.”

  “So everyone tells me.”

 
; “Not to mention a hunk.” Beth smiles. “Like father, like son.”

  A compliment veiled in sympathy. I like that. I like that a lot. “How’ve you been?”

  “Gymnastics keeps me busy.”

  “Sounds like it. I saw your name in the paper. You made it to nationals. That’s pretty cool.”

  “I guess.” She says this under her breath, stroking her hair with her free hand, taking a purposeful drag off her cigarette.

  “You guess? Two-time state all-around champion in high school, first Illinois gymnast to ever win the Big Ten All-Around, the fourth gymnast in Illinois history to qualify for the NCAA national championships. That’s pretty damn cool.”

  She smiles. “Why, Mr. Fitzpatrick, are you stalking me?”

  “Have been for years…” I lose my train of thought, distracted by Hatch leering at me over Beth’s shoulder.

  “He’s pissed I’m talking to you, isn’t he?” Beth douses her cigarette in the ashtray on the table.

  “Who?”

  “Hatch.”

  “I would assume so, yes.”

  “That dude has got to just fucking let it go.”

  “Hey, now.” My turn for a compliment. “You can’t blame a guy for being pissed off at losing someone like you.”

  “Shut up.” Beth punches me in the shoulder. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Whose heart are you breaking these days?”

  Beth has an overinflated opinion of me as a ladies’ man, partly because she always seems to catch me drunk at a bar, when my inhibitions are down and I don’t know when to shut up. Like tonight.