by Chris Lynch
“Don’t be,” he says, looking all around at the flora and fauna.
“You have to stop saying stuff like that. It’s not helpful. This feels like a dangerous situation, and sometimes fear is the correct response to such things. I mean, if you aren’t just talking nonsense-ow, ow, ow, stop it.”
He has grabbed my wrist, bent it forward, and applied his thumb hard to the depression at the base of my thumb. I am down on one knee before I even realize what’s happening.
“I love you, Daniel, more than anyone on earth. And I do not talk nonsense.”
“I understand,” I say, straining not to spill tears since that would probably provoke him to paper clip my eyeballs out. He helps me up again.
“You okay?” he says.
I nod. “So, what’s going to happen now?”
“Well, I’m not going to kill you or anything, if that’s what you mean. Unless you make me really mad.”
“I won’t do that. But I meant-”
“I know what you meant. The answer is…”
And here he does something that shocks me and unsettles me probably more than all the other stuff. He takes me by the hand, and holds on as we walk. I stare, in disbelief, at my grandfather’s inhumanly cold hand.
“The answer is, they are going to track me down, wherever we go. They will get me and bring me back and, one way or another, shush me.”
I shake loose of his hand, as if he has just done something to offend me, though he certainly has not.
“Shush you?”
“Yeah,” he says, “shush, you know…” He holds an index finger to his lips. “Hey, we had a very funny thing back when I was still working. If somebody needed shushing, we would do the regular shush, with the one finger. Shhhhhh. If it got more serious, then we elevated to quadro-shush.” He holds up four fingers of one hand like a karate chop and wiggles them in front of his lips as he shushes. “Then, if it was serious serious, they got the octo-shush.” He holds both hands up now, eight fingers waving like sea grass underwater, in front of his shushing lips.
“That is funny,” I say, “I guess.”
“Yeah,” he says, lowering his hands and looking up high into the tree where some large dusky bird of prey just dropped in. “I’m pretty sure they are going to octo-shush me, Young Man.”
I can almost see Da’s fade-out coming, happening as if by design, as the cloudiness moves across his face.
“Because of all that stuff you did? What you know?”
“Huh?” he says, looking distractedly at the bird.
“It’s because you decided to start talking about it after all this time. Maybe your conscience is trying to make a comeback.”
He shakes his head, not entertaining that theory for a second.
“I just forgot to forget.” He shrugs.
“Well, just stop talking, Old Boy? Simple. Clam up, for god’s sake, and everything can go back to fine and you and I can go to the races and stop being the races.”
He shrugs again, and it is another new and unwelcome trait. Never a shrugger, this man, never on the fence about anything. “What the hell. I’m dying anyway, aren’t I?”
“You are not-”
“It is fatal, and you know it. Even I know it. Takes too long anyway. Disassembles you by bits, till you are nothing but bits. Maybe somebody gives me a homemade lobotomy, they’re just doing me a favor, sparing me the worst of it.”
“Let’s go,” I say, tugging him by the arm. He has mentioned his coming death only a couple of times but it makes me want to kill him when he does. “You’ve stared at that bird long enough.”
He follows along with no resistance. It feels ever so slightly better to get the small sense of some control of something.
“You are a killer, Daniel.”
“Yeah, okay, right,” I say. I may sound patronizing, but I may not care.
“You are a killer, and you always have been one. That’s why I have always loved you the best.”
Me. A killer.
All the familiar words I am not supposed to use on him-demented, crazed, lunatic-are all the words I want to use on him right now.
Instead, I go a different way.
“If I am a killer,” I say, turning and confronting him flat-footed, “maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe you didn’t love me best because I am a killer. Maybe I am a killer because you loved me best.”
I suppose I expected that to cool his jets. But nothing comes as expected at this point.
As I walk on ahead, he says to my back, “I hope that’s true.”
It is all changing so quickly, so quickly. It is as if the grandfather I knew, whom I did not know, is a completely alternative version of himself now. We sleep a second night in the utter stillness of the ghostly college, and it is a kind of paradise, a kind of hell.
I wake to every shift in the fabric of the universe. I swear, one time I jump up at the sound of pine needles falling to the ground outside. Da said he slept more soundly last night than he has in memory. Which could mean three days. Still, it sounds good and he does look some kind of refreshed. I think he could probably stay here indefinitely.
Yet we don’t have indefinitely. We don’t have remotely indefinitely.
It is barely light when I get dressed and go out. I head over to the sports hall, where Jarrod and I went and shot baskets in the echoey gym yesterday during my grandfather’s nap. When Jarrod missed and retrieved his twenty-fifth free throw, I wandered off to look over the rest of the building. There was a game room with pinball and darts and foosball. There were vending machines. There was a small gym upstairs. And there was a quaint old-style pay phone booth.
Da confiscated my phone, but there shouldn’t be any reason not to use a landline, right?
So that is where I go, when the day breaks, my mind aches…
She answers her cell phone after four long rings.
“Lucy?”
“Holy macaroni, doofus, where are you?”
“You can’t tell anybody.”
“I don’t want to tell anybody. I just want to hear it myself. All kinds of everybody are looking for you guys. What have you done, ya gimp?”
“I took him.”
“You took him? Dan, that is a pretty flat explanation for somebody who just stole an ill and elderly man. What’s this phone, anyway? I almost didn’t answer when this number came up. Where’s your phone?”
“Da took it off me.”
The following silence is designed to make me listen to my words over again and feel the fool. I do it. This is what she does.
“So you stole the old man, and the old man overpowered you and stole your phone.”
This is the other thing she does really well. She rephrases circumstances and plays them back at you in order to compound your feeling of stupidity.
“Before, I was just a little worried about you. But jeez, Bonnie and Clyde you ain’t.”
“Right, thanks, Luce, I’m glad I made my one call to you. I feel a lot better now. Talk to you soon.”
“Sheesh, you and your thin skin.”
“I don’t have thin skin. Why do people keep saying that?”
“Maybe because you get all teary when somebody criticizes your new haircut.”
“That was not teary, that was hair products stinging my-”
“Where are you, Dan?”
“Entebeyar.”
“You are making things up now. There is no such place as Entebeyar.”
“No, that was not a name. It’s a saying, Da’s been using it, about his work days. NTBR. Not to Be Repeated.”
“So then the two of you are out there playing secret agents. That’s actually very considerate of you, joining up to your grandfather’s dementia. Darn sweet.”
“I half think I am. It has all gotten so surreal, Lucy.”
“Where are you, Daniel?”
“Entebeyar.”
“All right, already.”
“We came to stay with Jarrod. At the college.”
/>
There is that silence again.
“Cousin Jarrod?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, this Jarrod?” She makes a sharp-intake-of-air noise, like either she has just sipped scalding soup, or she’s imitating Jarrod toking up.
“Yes,” I say.
“Brother, I know you haven’t been gone long, but it is still a miracle you remain alive.”
I take a deep breath, pound the pay phone with coins.
“That’s a lot of coins,” she says.
“This is a lot of freaky.”
And to the best of my ability, I tell her.
“Are you on drugs?” she says after a bit. “Dan, sorry, but all signs point to you being on drugs. There’s Jarrod. There’s the fantasy stuff, there’s the poor judgment in running in the first place, there’s the poor judgment in running to Jarrod…
there’s Jarrod…”
“I am not on drugs. I am starting to think I am stuck in somebody else’s hallucination.”
“I still can’t believe it,” she says. “He was always mean, but I wouldn’t think violent or scary to people who were not his family.”
“All I can tell you is, somehow, it seems a little more believable all the time now. He is kind of scary.”
“Dan, then leave him. Or bring him back. Let them deal with him.”
“That’s what you would do?”
“Absolutely.”
“I can’t. I can’t. He’s…”
She knows. Everybody knows. She doesn’t feel the same way about him but she feels that I feel it.
“You are a dope, Danny.”
“Maybe. Don’t tell anybody.”
“Everybody already knows you’re a dope.”
“No, I mean don’t tell anybody that you talked to me. Octo-shush.”
“What is that, now?”
I explain octo-shush.
“When they catch up to you, you are both going in for observation. You know that, don’t you?”
“No. Because they are not catching us. I’ll call you.”
“Okay. Be careful, Dan. Right? Take care of yourself first. Right?”
“See ya soon.”
After I get off the phone with Lucy, I take my slow meander back from the gym. It is a cracker of a late-summer northern feeling. The air is autumn cool, and mist rises everywhere as the sun gets to work, cutting through the trees and landing in shazam slashes over the buildings and grounds. The pine smell is like it’s been pumped out of a cypress-size spray can. You really could spend a lot of time here. It would nice to be able to spend a lot of time here.
When I finally reach the dorms, Jarrod is in our kitchen eating a bowl of Froot Loops the size of my head.
“Seen Da yet?” I ask him.
“No, sir, not yet. Froot Loops?”
“Um, maybe not, thanks.”
“You sure? You need to get your five-a-day.”
The man does make me smile. “You’re a good man, Jarrod. Thank you for this.”
“You kidding? Pleasure’s all mine. I can’t wait for the codger to get up so I can listen to him.”
I take a seat across from him.
“What’s the worst thing he’s told you?”
“Worst? None of them are bad. You mean best?”
“Okay, then?”
“My personal favorite was the one where they set a guy’s face on fire with his own glasses, in the sun in Cyprus.”
It’s been a long day already.
“Try not to believe everything he says, Jarrod. He’s not well.”
“Cyprus is really, really hot, though. And the guy was a nerd, with flaky dry skin and very thick glasses. That’s the key to the story, the very, very thick glasses.”
He really is a good guy. And it is to everybody’s benefit that he located the only job he could likely ever do.
“Anyway, again, thanks. You really helped us out here, and put yourself in a tough position. But we are going to have to get moving soon.”
“Mi casa es su casa… until the students come back. Then the boiler room is mi casa and you have to get on out of here.”
I head out of the kitchen. “We’ll be gone well before that, I’m afraid.”
I walk down the hallway to Da’s room, just on the other side of the showers from mine. When I get there, the door is open, his bed is empty, and all his clothes are there on the floor.
“Jarrod!” I shout, echoing down every empty hall in the school and chasing all the birds into flight.
6
What is violence anyway, he asked.
A punch in the mouth? A cluster bomb? A needle in the eye?
What about just doing nothing when you should be doing something? Sometimes, can that be violence?
Let Gorgons be Gorgons, Da said. Sometimes hurt has to happen, he said, and that is not violence. Sometimes nobody lays a glove, and it’s barbaric.
Can you do what you need to do, whatever you need to do, at the moment you need to do it, Young Man? That is the important thing. That is the separator.
Could you do it, if you needed to? Whatever it might be?
7
“Where could he be, after all, Dan-o? It’s a small place, a safe place. Couldn’t hurt yourself if you tried, and I’ve tried lots.”
“A small place? Jarrod, there must be hundreds of acres here.”
“Really?”
It is a tall, tall order, with the grounds being so vast, so densely wooded for much of it. And I don’t even feel safe calling out his name, because I am paranoid that somebody who is the wrong somebody is going to hear us.
“Ollllldd duuuude!” Jarrod calls out.
I punch him hard on the arm.
“Shut up,” I tell him in an angry whisper, though even I think whispering is more than paranoid.
“Mwaaa, waa, waa,” I hear, garbled and possibly not even words to begin with, but certainly human. The sound seems to come from a long way off.
“There,” Jarrod says with some pride. “I found him for you. Calm down and let’s go celebrate.”
“What are you talking about? We’re going to get him.”
“All the way down there? On foot?”
“Grrr.”
“Come on, we’ll go get the tractor-mower. I have to cut the grass down on the playing fields this morning anyway.”
“You are so lazy,” I say. “Which way exactly? I am going down right now and you can meet me there.”
“Well, for me it’s up that paved road and then right on the next one, but as the crow flies, probably straight through these bits here. I’ll race ya.”
I am already cross-country running through the trees before I can answer his dumb challenge. I’m dumb enough myself, trying to call out to my grandfather as I run full tilt, but trying to whisper-yell so as not to be heard by anyone else.
He answers, though. Well, no, he doesn’t. He is there all right, probably a couple of hundred feet away at this point, and he is vocalizing, but it isn’t to me, and it isn’t in any English I recognize.
“Da,” I pant as I emerge into the clearing. If it were a football field, I’d be at my own goal line and he’d be at about the opposing thirty-yard line. I defy my unfit body and break into another sprint. He sees me.
And breaks away in the other direction.
“Da,” I call out again and again, but he barely looks back at me as he plunges into the far woods.
Eventually, I catch the old guy, and he is panting, but not as hard as I am. I turn him around and we breathe heavily into each other’s face. I am sweating a lot, but the cool forest air is peeling off the heat quickly.
It must be cooling him even quicker, because he is standing in his bare feet and pajamas. He has deep scratches on his hands and feet, bleeding like he’s been crawling through bramble hedges.
“What are you doing, Old Boy?” I ask, and I feel myself choke up just slightly as I ask it.
I step forward, to hug him, to warm us both, to stop him from answe
ring.
And he punches me dead in the mouth.
I can hear Jarrod’s tractor-mower thing coming down the hill as I run after my grandfather once more. I can already feel my right eyetooth wiggling in its socket and a little bit of fat lip and blood.
“Jeez,” I say, catching him, wrapping him up, and, dammit, hugging him.
“Kill me, then,” he says. “It’s about time you caught me. You boys were always two steps behind. Kill me. Fair enough.”
“It’s not them, Da,” I say, holding him tight, breathing close enough into his ear to bite it off. “It’s me. It’s Daniel.”
He does not respond for a full minute. Then, “I was just going for cigarettes.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I say. “Nothing wrong with that.”
“It’s cold,” he says.
“Would you like a lift, sir?”
“I would, yes. I would like that. You are a good boy,” he says.
“Well, I try to be,” I say, releasing him from my grip and steering him back toward the field and to Jarrod. I hold on to his shoulders as if he is manually operated.
When we step back onto the smooth grass and Jarrod steps up to meet us, the old guy acts once more on impulse.
He punches unsuspecting Jarrod straight in the face.
Jarrod actually goes down. But he is laughing as he gets back to his feet. “Wow, that hurt a lot. Spankings from a granddad like you would put kids in the hospital.”
We hop on the mower once Da starts recognizing Jarrod’s distinctive manner.
“Did you ever kill anybody?” Jarrod says, steering the machine back up toward the dorms.
“Only once,” Da says, staring at the surroundings as if it were all just built and planted since he passed through earlier this morning.
“Tell it, man. Tell it, come on.”
Da hugs himself through the chill.
“No, I won’t,” he says. And the chill in his voice is so noticeable that even Jarrod recognizes not to ask again unless he wants to be number two.
“Did you take your medications this morning like you were supposed to?” I ask the shivering, shriveled Old Boy as he slips back into bed.
“I don’t take medications. Medications are for gimps, simps, and wimps.”