by Chris Lynch
Among his many advanced skills, my grandfather can hold a pirate face.
“What are you playing at?” he says again. “Who walks at this hour? Rats and raccoons, that’s who, and that’s all.”
I sit on the side of the bed. “I’ll be the raccoon,” I say, poking him.
“The hell you will,” he says, slapping my hand aside and shoving me out of his way, “I’m no damn rat.”
I didn’t lie. We did take a walk. We walked the three hundred yards, in the dark, to the park where we take our daily exercise. At four a.m. it is approximately twelve hours early. Okay, we also take an early walk, to the store about a quarter mile away. But even the early walk doesn’t happen until ten, and it is completely negated by being a venture to buy the pack of ciggies Da semisecretly smokes every day. He’s not supposed to smoke.
But we don’t do our circuits of the lovely, leafy park. We get into the waiting rust-bucket red Subaru wagon belonging to my cousin Jarrod.
“Wa-hey,” Jarrod says excitedly as we pile in.
“Wa-hey,” Da says, happy to take the backseat.
I get the front. “Jarrod, man, it reeks in here. Four o’clock in the morning, pal, and you are already sparking up?”
He pulls quickly away from the curb. “Danny Boy, I swear, that’s from yesterday.”
The smoke is clearly still visible in the vehicle’s close air.
“I can still see the smoke!”
He bows his head in something like shame. I reach over and adjust his forehead like it’s a rearview mirror. “Watch the road, fool. And pull over. I’m driving.”
We make the stop and change-up slick as a slightly addled pit crew at Daytona and are off again.
“I’m really sorry,” Jarrod says. “I was just really anxious. I’ve never been a getaway driver before and I just needed a soother to settle my nerves.”
“You are not a getaway driver,” I snap.
“Well, not anymore. You are.”
“Don’t bogart that joint,” says Da from the back.
I try to stare back at him while still being safe at the wheel.
“Da!” I say.
“That is a cool old man,” Jarrod says.
“Da!” I say, suddenly unable not to be the prim parent of the group.
“Oh, please,” Da says, waving me off in the mirror.
“He’s just being provocative,” I say to Jarrod. “Comes with the territory.”
“What do you know?” Da says. “For your information, I lived the early seventies almost exclusively on cocaine and fruit smoothies.”
Jarrod is laughing and worshipping at the same time. “That’s incredible,” he says.
“I know,” says Da coolly. “Practically nobody had even heard of smoothies then.”
They are not related, being from opposite sides of my family. Jarrod is my mother’s brother’s kid, and for the most part is left alone by the family to do his own thing. He is twenty-seven years old and basically nobody has any clue what his thing might be.
Which is one reason I thought of him.
Another is that I knew he would be available, come on short notice, and not bother with uncomfortable questions.
Best of all, and maybe most shameful for me-if I had time for shame-is that he shares something in common with Da: He will remember very little of what transpires.
I do love him, though. And there’s nothing as powerful as the amalgam of love plus need.
“You are sure, Jarrod, that there is nobody there right now. As in no-body, right?”
“Boyo,” he says, “the students don’t come back for another two weeks, every last faculty and administration type is off squeezing the dregs out of the vacation, and I remain as king and emperor of all I survey there. It’s a really small school and all, and I think they even left me with, like, the only set of keys. It’s like twenty-five hundred keys or something.”
“I have more keys than that,” Da crows.
“Really?” Jarrod says.
It’s a three-hour drive. I do hope they both get sleepy before they get fussy.
Jarrod is the caretaker at a tiny college that you reach by driving to nowhere and then continuing on for another forty-five minutes. At peak term time it has approximately five hundred students, the vast majority of them sent there for its remoteness. Tuition is relatively high for a small school that isn’t known for doing anything particularly noteworthy, particularly well. The truth is, it is a haven for wealthy kids who have slalomed their way down to the bottom of the academic slope. And they do have a ski team. It’s a haven for their parents, really, and as such, the place is shiny and handsome and very well-equipped.
And getting in or out, through its private dense woodland covering about the landmass of Rhode Island, takes above-average determination.
“Left at the tree,” Jarrod says when I finally prod him awake.
We are looking at about fifty million trees.
“Once we find the place, Jarrod, I’m going to kick your ass.”
“We’re close, we’re close, I swear. It’s just…”
Lots of Jarrod’s sentences end just that way, so I am not hopeful.
“Quarter mile up,” Da says, surprising me into jerking the wheel. He has not given any sign of consciousness for an hour. “There will be a very small duck pond on your left. A fishing hut and a west-facing bench for watching the sunsets. Fifty yards past that there is a T junction. Take a right. I’m going to kill somebody if I don’t get a cigarette.”
I quickly get over the mild shock and beyond-mild skepticism I feel about Da’s contribution because I don’t have a lot of options and it’s always possible he is entering that so-far-gone-he’s-visionary stage of things. Then when the pond and hut and bench and junction all show up precisely on cue, I am converted.
“I don’t think that’s the way,” Jarrod says when I take the appointed right.
“Now go straight for another half mile,” Da says. “When you reach the granite quarry, take the small mountain road around the left and you run right into the school.”
“There’s a quarry?” says Jarrod.
In a short while, we’re comin’ round the mountain when suddenly the beautiful private-private school is comin’ round right back at us.
“Wow,” I say, at the wonder of this place, looking like an Alpine village Heidi might recognize but still having the fresh-minted gleam of something that just went ten years over estimate and ten times over budget.
“Wow,” says Jarrod, and he probably has a reason, but right now I don’t care what it is.
We all pile out of the red Subaru, and Da is doubled over with arthritis in his hips and back. He walks like a seven for a minute, in a circle, grimacing but working it out.
“Sorry, Da,” I say, going to him, working my thumbs into the spots on his back I know too well. The hips are on their own.
“Sorry what? Get me a cigarette,” he says irritably.
I grab my backpack out of the car. It is actually a rucksack, fairly roomy, but still not much for the both of us on an open-ended trip. The important thing right now is the sturdy little box in the front pouch.
Da draws in, and in, three inhales before one exhale, and it is as if he is imbibing hinge oil directly into his bones and joints. He straightens up, then up, and up, until he has been pneumatically returned to his full physical self.
He looks at the butt admiringly. “Why on earth do you get such bad press?”
“How do you know this place, Da?” I ask as I wander through the parking lot. Jarrod has wrangled the rucksack over his back and is ambling toward the curved chalet-style building that looks like a hotel and must be the student lodgings. Our lodgings.
“You guys are going to love this,” he calls back. “It’s just like living in The Shining.”
“Can’t beat that,” Da says, lighting another cigarette to make up for the deprivations of the early rise and long drive.
“Da?” I say.
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sp; He turns from Jarrod’s direction and toward me, slowly taking in the panorama as he does. It is piney, crisp, and fresh, trees looking like they were peed on by dinosaurs, the parking lot empty as advertised, the small words spoken floating easily on the breeze and bouncing back off the woods and unpeopled buildings and stony silent hills like faces of old wise men who will never tell.
He smokes less frantically now, smiles, and flashes me the unmistakable sharp lucidity of the good times.
He is happy. Right now. Unobserved.
I am a good boy.
“An unobserved life, Young Man, is the only life worth living.”
“Is that so, Old Boy?”
“Yes. You are not who you are, when you are being watched. You never even find out who you are, while you are being watched.”
“Well, I suppose that’s why we are here now. To get you away from the observation.”
“I know.”
Everybody everywhere says “I know,” I know. It means next to nothing. But when Da says “I know,” I need to know.
“Do you, Da? Do you get what this is all about?”
He pauses, walks up to me with his head tilted in a quizzical way, a thin smile aimed at me. When he is right in front of me, he holds up his wrist, showing off his MedicAlert.
“Daniel, this says ‘memory loss.’ It does not say ‘moron.’”
I look down at my feet for a few seconds. It has been my intention right along to be sure I never made him feel like that.
“I’m sorry, Da. I swear I didn’t mean that at all.”
“Didn’t mean what?” he says chirpily to the top of my shamed head.
This is not a good time for one of his mental departures. I look up expecting the sad, scary vacant look.
Except he’s grinning, almost giggling like a kid.
“So you were just faking that, yes?” I say.
“I’m always faking,” he says slyly. “You really should never pay any attention to me at all.”
“Okay,” I say. “I won’t.”
“And one more thing. You are really going to have to toughen up. Don’t be so sensitive. Sensitivity is fatal in this world. I wouldn’t have cared if I hurt your feelings, so don’t worry about mine.”
I wait to see if he’s got anything else. When he doesn’t, I nod and walk past him on the way to the dorms.
“I guess it’s a good thing I don’t pay attention to you at all now.”
“Ha!” he says at my back. It is a very approving ha.
I suppose this could be a dry run for my actual college experience coming up in a few weeks. If it is, I will be well prepared to be part of the oddest dorm trio on any campus.
Jarrod and Da are talking at the table of our small kitchen when I come out from the shower.
“Sheez-o, man, Danny, why didn’t you tell me what a full-blown trip your granddad is?”
“I guess we’re just modest on this side of the family. Why, what’s he been telling you?”
“What hasn’t he been telling me?”
I wait for elaboration. I wait in vain.
“Da?”
“I’ve just been filling young Jarrod in on the thrills and chills of my exploits in the world of agribusiness.”
“Angry-business,” Jarrod pipes up. “That’s what the guys all called it.”
I stare at Da for signs. Is he in? Is he out? Is he still with us?
His squint-eyed mischief-maker face tells me he is very much in. There is none of the crazy on him right now.
“Okay,” I say, taking up a chair opposite my grandfather, “what exploits would those be?”
“Tell him the Tel Aviv one,” Jarrod says.
“I believe someone said something about a smoke?” Da says, all cagey hold-back all of a sudden.
“Absolutely,” Jarrod says, fishing a Rastafarian-quality spliff out of his shirt pocket.
“Da?” I ask, and I hear myself sounding like a prig, but really. “Are you serious here?”
“Sure, why not? Now that I am retired”-he chews every letter before spitting the word out-“I can self-medicate at will. That’s what they want anyway, really.”
Jarrod lights up, pulls hard, then breathes out the words “Tell Tel Aviv.”
“There’s not a whole lot to tell, really. I just had an assignment to climb up the front of an apartment building that was partially under construction, climb onto a man’s balcony, and damage his eyes.”
“What?” I say in a tall, shrill voice. “What? I mean, what? You never did that. He’s pulling your leg, Jarrod.”
Jarrod looks deflated, watching Da draw hard on the smoke.
Da then speaks in that smoke voice. “All true,” he rasps.
“What? What? Why? Why would you do that?”
“Because I was told to. I was just doing my job. You know, a straightened paper clip punctures straight through a man’s eyelids with surprisingly little resistance.”
“What?” I am not making much progress, admittedly. “What? What does any of that have to do with agribusiness?”
“Angry-business,” Jarrod corrects me. “You want a hit off this?”
“No,” I squeal. “Come on, Da. Stop with all the nutty now. You are scaring me here.”
“Don’t be scared, Young Man,” he says, and all trace of jokiness has vanished. “Don’t be scared. It doesn’t do you any good, and it keeps you from realizing your potential.”
Potential. It sounds like a funny word at the moment. Could my dear grandfather possibly have the potential to create the grisly mayhem he’s talking about? I am not stupid; I am not naive. I always suspected his professional life wasn’t quite as tidy and straight as he made it out to be. And yes, the weird special interest he’s been getting from old colleagues suggests that things are more serious than I had believed. But I was thinking maybe they were just getting worried that his loose cannonism meant he was going to start disseminating classified-type information. I would not have believed this.
And I still don’t.
“Why would you actually maim another person, Da? It just doesn’t compute. You can be a prickly guy sometimes, but there’s no way you could ever be-”
“He was a scientist of some kind,” Da says offhandedly. “I really didn’t do a lot of homework on him, so I didn’t know hardly anything about him. All I knew was that he was doing some great and important work, for which he needed his eyes, and he was doing that work for the incorrect guys.”
Now, I get a chill.
I take the joint.
I cough hard enough to break my own ribs, because I don’t smoke.
Da hops up and pounds my back, hard and many times, until I have to ask him to stop.
Here is one of my weaknesses, the kind of thing Da always mocked and scolded me for. When events spin out my control and understanding, I instinctively call my sister. Yes, it is childish, and no, she does not normally come up with insights or warm words. In fact, she is usually kind of an ass.
But the world gets back on its axis when I do it. For whatever reason.
I take out my cell phone.
“What are you doing?” Da asks.
“Making a call. Just calling home. To see if anybody even noticed we’re gone.”
“No,” Da says, and wrests the phone out of my hand with such calm authority, I feel, for a second, like that other stuff could actually be true. “No cell phones, Daniel. The basics here. You use your phone and they will be here today. You want them to catch us?” He assaults my phone like he’s disemboweling roadkill for supper, removing the battery and stuffing it in one pocket, slipping the SIM card into another.
“Hey, I got that phone for my graduation,” I said.
“You’re in college now. Stop living in the past.”
Again, it’s in his words, his tone. It was almost a lark, stealing him away so he could avoid observation. But hearing him actually put words to it, hearing him acknowledge… them…
catch us… makes it feel real a
nd nasty and dangerous.
“Technology is for chumps,” Da says.
“This is for real, isn’t it?” I say, coming very late to the party.
“Yes it is, Young Man.”
“And it’s serious.”
“Deadly so.”
The air is heavy, smoke hanging there like it is never going to leave. The big, fat, scary words floating there too. I am speechless.
Jarrod is not. “Tell another one, Da. What else you got?”
“Okay,” says Da, like the genial gramps telling the little ones bedtime tales. “But first we have to eat. I am starving.”
The thought of food makes me retch.
There are a lot of woods around this campus. That’s a good thing, because woods are good. Comforting, relaxing, healthifying. But it’s also a bad thing because I never realized before that woods are damn scary.
In fairness, everything is scary now.
I am seeing shadows behind every tree. I hear unfamiliar bird calls and I am thinking it’s them and their array of clever spook tricks, tracking us and closing in and surrounding us. A chipmunk darts out of a hole and scares the squat out of me. A chipmunk.
Da looks as comfortable and calm as could be. It may have a little bit to do with the fact that in the last twenty-four hours he has gotten comfortable and calm with Jarrod at least three times. He’s not high right now, though. We are taking our daily exercise in a whole new atmospheric landscape, but he has that same contented air about him as if we were walking in the park back home.
It’s good to get out with him, just the two of us. I asked Jarrod if he wanted to come and he looked at me as if I had offered him some amateur, unmedicated surgery.
“Why would anybody want to just, like, walk?”
So I just asked for guidance, as he was the caretaker and all. Like, where freaks like us might find a decent walking trail or two.
“What is this, an exam? I am an employee here, not a student.”
“Jarrod?”
“Over that way somewhere,” he said, pointing vaguely with his nose since his hands and eyes were taken up with butchering a bunch of simulated people on his video game.
So we found “that way somewhere” basically on our own.
“I know you don’t like to hear this kind of thing, Da, but I am really worried.”