I sat at the table with her. I felt awkward. Truth was I would have felt awkward if I hadn’t felt awkward. “Okay, what are we talking about?”
“You know how you have that painting out there? At least we think there’s a painting in there.”
“Yes.”
“It’s a secret, right?”
“I guess. I hadn’t thought about it like that.”
“But it’s your private thing, right?”
“That’s true.”
“You don’t want anyone else to see it.”
“That’s true enough.” I got up to pour myself a cup of coffee, but more I was trying to break her control over the conversation. “So, what is this all about?” I sat back down.
“I have a secret.”
“Okay.”
“You have to promise not to tell Mom,” she said.
“Well, I can’t say I can do that.”
“I won’t tell you unless you promise.” She paused to listen for movement in the rest of the house. “Promise me.”
“Okay, I promise.”
“You won’t tell her.”
“Okay.”
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
I surprised myself by remaining very calm. I blew on my coffee and watched her eyes until she looked away. “Are you all right?” I asked.
“I’m pregnant,” she said, as if I were being thick-headed and not understanding her.
“I heard you and I want to know if you’re all right.”
“Aren’t you mad?”
“I don’t know enough to be mad. I just want you to be all right. No, I’m not mad at you.”
“You’re disappointed.”
“Are you all right?” I asked again.
“I think so. Don’t you want to know who the father is?” April was tearing up now, yet her voice did not break.
“Is that really important? I’m concerned about you.”
“You can’t tell Mom,” she said, regaining composure.
“Well, that’s going to be difficult.”
“You promised.”
She was right, I had promised. My quiet manner had always been a failing and it was now as well, my wanting but being unwilling to ask or incapable of asking the questions that I imagined an outraged parent should ask. But I wasn’t outraged, not angry, not disappointed, not terribly upset. I was only concerned and in a way, even at that precise moment, I was a bit proud of myself. And as quickly I felt shame for at all considering myself at that moment.
“You promised,” she repeated.
I nodded. I had made a promise, in no uncertain terms. I wondered just what I had done. Was it an admission to an obligation to remain silent or merely a prediction that I would not? Richard had promised me that he would destroy my painting should I die of a sudden, but neither of us was deluded enough not to imagine that he would likely be unable to follow through. But how could I fail in this promise? It occurred to me that whereas my promise was voluntary, more or less, my obligation to abide by it was anything but. It was rather straightforward and for some reason it felt more binding for the fact that I was pressed into making it; it was not my idea. I looked at my daughter’s face. She was so young. How could she be pregnant? “You know,” I said, “this is not the sort of thing you can hide indefinitely.”
“I won’t have to,” she said.
I was a clumsy old father, but I wasn’t completely clueless. “You’re certain about this?” I asked.
“I’m sixteen years old, Dad. I can’t have a baby.”
“All right.”
“Do you have a problem with me having an abortion?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it. I haven’t had a chance to think about it. I mean no, I don’t have a problem with it. I have a problem with your mother not knowing about this.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, Mom and I haven’t been getting along all that well lately.”
That came as news to me. I had known for some time that I was out of the family loop, but I didn’t know how much. And now I didn’t know whether I was being manipulated by my daughter and if so, to what end. Whatever the case, I felt guilty for having been so distracted, so self-absorbed, most sadly maybe self-intrigued, that I was ignorant, oblivious about the dynamics of my family. I didn’t know enough to know whether it was true that she and her mother were estranged.
“Why aren’t you two getting along?” I asked.
April shrugged. “It’s a mother-daughter thing.”
“What about us? Do we get along?”
“It depends on what you mean by get along. We don’t fight. We also don’t talk. We don’t know what’s going on with each other. I don’t think you’ve asked me one question in over a year.”
“Is that true?”
April shrugged, smiled. “That you don’t know is an answer of sorts, don’t you think?”
“I guess it is. I’m sorry.”
The thing I admired about Leonardo da Vinci was his insatiable hunger to understand everything around him. A good thing in an artist, but at this I was a miserable failure, wanting at every turn to know how light affected color, how texture affected spatial orientation, and yet, in regard to my own inner life, I was oblivious as to how my secrets had influenced, shaped my vision, in the most literal sense. But unlike my hero Leonardo’s beautiful method of extracting nature’s secrets from painstaking observation, I had deluded myself into believing that nature would simply reveal itself to me, like the coral of a sunset, like the many whites of snow. Instead, I failed even to see the most transparent and patent features of my own family. I was ashamed of myself.
“And so what do I do?” I asked Richard. We were sitting in the pleasant little coffee shop not far from the university campus. “Do I actually keep this thing to myself?”
“This is why I never had children.” Richard looked out the window at a couple of passing students. “They let them in younger every year. Were we ever so young?”
I watched Richard sip his too-sweet iced coffee drink through a straw. “Do you know what you look like drinking that?”
“A sophisticate?”
I said nothing.
“You made a promise,” Richard said.
“Sort of.”
“Did you say ‘I promise’?”
I looked out the window.
“Then there is no sort of. A promise is a magic incantation that changes you and the world around you. Hume compared it to transubstantiation.”
“Yeah, well, he wasn’t serious.”
“Still.”
“There is no way I can keep this from Linda.”
“I agree,” Richard said.
“So you believe it’s okay for me to break my promise?”
“I didn’t say that. It’s never okay to break a promise. A promise is a promise is a promise. Then there’s the whole secret thing.”
“Secret thing?”
“Your daughter, the teenage girl you thought didn’t know you existed or at least she didn’t care in the least, chose you of all people to keep the biggest secret of her life up to this point.”
“We know a little about secrets, don’t we?”
“Do you know who the father is?”
“No.”
“Did you ask?”
“I don’t care,” I told him, looked into my empty coffee cup.
Richard was mute for a beat, playing with his straw. “You know, you might want to ask her that. How does she know she’s really pregnant? Did she take a test or just miss her period?”
“I was a little stunned when she told me. I didn’t want to turn the moment into an interrogation. I should have her see the doctor.”
“What about the father? What if the father wants the baby? Doesn’t he have rights?”
“Fuck the father. I don’t care who he is or what his rights are. I care about my daughter. I care about April.”
“If I still smoked I’d light a cigarette right now,” Richard said. �
�I imagine that marriage is a kind of promise, a promise to share everything or some shit like that. So, you’ve got two promises to keep and keeping either one means breaking the other. You’re what we call fucked.”
“You’re very helpful.”
“Of course you have to tell Linda,” he said.
“I know that.”
The young waitress came and I sent her away. I watched her collect an order from the counter. Her hands were olive, smooth, young. I wondered what secrets she had told her father.
“I know I have to tell Linda,” I said. “I have to tell her because it’s the right thing to do.”
“Yeah.”
“And I have to tell her because I need her help in this. I’m not certain how to best help April.”
1979
The cantina was so much a cliché that it wasn’t one. It was a small cinder-block affair with a short door roughly constructed out of two-by-sixes and two-by-fours. The Bummer carried his half-drunk beer as we entered, he being rather loud upon doing so, singing “Yankee Doodle,” of all tunes. The floor was dirt, but, perhaps from being covered for so long, was not the same dirt as outside, it being darker yet less red, a little finer. There were two booths, two tables, four stools at a battered strangely waist-high bar. A fat woman tended a sloppily made fireplace in the corner of the far wall. The room was smoky and thick with the almost pleasant smell of burning wood. There was a bearded man behind the bar and another man seated in a booth, his face down on folded arms on the table.
“Give me that picture,” the Bummer said. He turned to look at Richard. “Give me that picture of your brother.”
Richard gave it to him.
“You two go and have a seat over there,” the Bummer said. “In the pretty green booth.”
We did as instructed. We watched as the psycho walked cockily up to the bar; he walked like John Wayne, a near limp, almost a stagger.
“Hola, amigo,” he said. “Cómo estás?”
The bartender said nothing as he drew near.
The Bummer held the photo up for the man to see, looked at it himself. “Has visto a este hombre?”
“I no see this man,” the bartender said in English.
“Has Carlos been around?”
The man shook his head.
The Bummer stared at him for a couple of seconds then called to the woman. “Yo, mamacita!”
The woman glanced up for a second, then turned back to the fire, shaking her head.
The Bummer walked away, laughed noiselessly, and then walked over to the sleeping drunk. He grabbed the man by his hair and lifted his head, looked at his face, and let it fall back to the table with a thud.
Richard caught my eyes and said, “What the fuck?”
I shrugged.
The Bummer came to our booth, but didn’t sit. He looked at the ceiling and around the tavern. “I got what I came for.”
“And what’s that?” I asked.
“You didn’t learn anything,” Richard said. “You showed them the picture and you didn’t learn a fucking thing.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Now let’s blow this pop stand.”
I felt like an idiot following that asshole back out to the Caddy, but what else could we do now?
“So, what now?” Richard asked.
“We drive on. There’s something I want to look at.”
“And what’s that?” I asked.
“Collecting intel.”
“Intel,” I said, looking at Richard and probably rolling my eyes.
“I thought you said we were going about thirty miles,” Richard said. “This is way more than thirty miles.”
“Misjudged.”
We fell into the Caddy and drove on. We traveled deeper into the mountains, the road, fortunately, not quite as treacherous as before. A blue bus with a couple of passengers passed us going the other way and I realized we had not seen another vehicle all day.
“What’s the story?” I said. “Why no cars on this road?” I looked into the backseat when there came no answer and saw that the Bummer was again asleep. “He’s out again.”
Richard just stared at the road. His was angry and perhaps a bit embarrassed that he’d gotten us into this.
“Pull over.” This from the backseat. The Bummer was different now, more serious or nervous, skittish, I didn’t know which but I found it mildly alarming. If not before, then certainly at that point things became dreamlike, not in the hazy, milky sort of dreamscape way, but in the sharply defined, intensely clarified, markedly illuminated dream, scarier than the other kind and so clear that it defied interpretation.
“You girls ready to get wet?” the Bummer asked.
“What?” From Richard.
“Stay behind me,” the psycho said.
We did. We followed him across the road to a dirt lane that I had not noticed, far too rough for the Cadillac. After about a couple hundred meters the lane became a trail. We climbed.
“You boys believe in God?” the Bummer asked. He slung the rifle over his shoulder.
“No,” I said. “Do you?”
“I was raised to believe in God,” the Bummer said.
“Do you?” I asked. “Actually believe in God?”
“Yeah, there’s a god, but he’s no good at his job. He’s a fuckup. There’s probably a family of them, gods, and we got the stupid one.”
As we approached the crest of a hill, the Bummer motioned for us to stop, held a crooked index finger to his pursed lips. He dropped to all fours and crawled to the top and looked over. He rested his chin on his rifle. Richard and I dropped down and worked our way up to join him.
Below us there was nothing but an empty meadow of tall pea-green grass, the wind scratching the nap of it, changing the color from dark to light and back. The Bummer looked over at us and nodded, as if to say, “There you have it.”
“What are we looking at?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “That’s the point.”
“What’s the point?” I looked at Richard. He appeared sick, like he might vomit. “Why the fuck did you bring us out here?” I asked.
“How were we going to see that there’s nothing here if we didn’t fuckin’ come here?”
I paused, somewhat stunned by his irreproachable logic, though dismayed by his dull-wittedness. “What does it mean that there’s nothing here?”
“Why are you even talking to this son of a bitch?” Richard asked me. “The man is crazy.”
“Who the fuck are you calling crazy?” The Bummer’s tone shifted to menace and we were reminded, jarringly, that he was armed.
“Well, you are crazy,” I said.
He glared at me the way he had during that first meeting in his trailer. Then his face softened. “I guess that’s right.” He smiled and stood up. “I guess everybody’s a little crazy.”
That was easily the craziest and most unhinged thing he had yet said, not because it was untrue but simply for the fact that it was being uttered by a crazy man. Sadly, I had to agree with him and was quite convinced that we were equally crazy for just being there.
“So, where to now?” Richard asked, a step behind the Bummer. “Where do we find our next nothing?”
The Bummer looked at the sky. “It gets dark fast up here. We can build a fire and sleep outside or we can sleep in the car or we can drive all the fucking way back to town just to drive back here tomorrow. What do you think?”
Richard and I kicked at the dirt. I think he didn’t know what to say as much as I didn’t know what to say. “It’s cold out here,” I said to end our somewhat ham-fisted silence.
“It’s cold out here,” the Bummer mocked me.
“We didn’t come prepared to camp out,” Richard said.
“Pussies,” the Bummer said. “Come on. Drive us back to the cantina.”
“Why?”
“We’ll spend the night there,” the Bummer said. “Nice warm fire. Great conversation.”
“So, we’re going all the way back
there?” I said. “And where do we go in the morning?”
“Why, we continue our search.”
“Stop talking to him,” Richard said. “Just stop talking to him.”
After driving through a hum of awkward silence I stopped the car in the same spot in front of the cantina.
The Bummer led us back into the tavern. “Dormimos aqui,” he announced to the bartender. “Cerveza, por favor.”
The fire was still burning, but the old woman was gone. The drunk remained, head on table. We fell clumsily into the same booth, Richard and I across from the Bummer.
“Some beers, some sleep, and tomorrow we find your brother,” the Bummer said, snapping his fingers to hurry the bartender.
“Fuck you,” Richard said.
The Bummer didn’t acknowledge him, but put a cigarette in his mouth. “Tomorrow,” he repeated.
The little man brought us the beers, put them on the table, and just walked away. I thanked the man. The Bummer thanked him louder.
The Bummer looked at us in turn and then took his beer and sat opposite the drunk man in the other booth. He lay down on the seat. I moved to occupy the bench across from Richard and lay down also, closed my eyes. “We really ought to sleep,” I sighed.
“It’s hardly dark,” Richard said.
“I don’t care.”
“He’s asleep. We can just get in the car and go back to the city. Fly home tomorrow.”
“Not that I think that’s a bad idea, but I don’t trust us to find our way, especially in the dark.”
Richard did not argue.
It was still dark when I awoke from a rather uncomfortable, fitful sleep made worse by a dream that had me dressed like a Vietnamese farmer, conical straw hat and all, hiding in a rice paddy in the pitch darkness waiting for American soldiers to pass by. As a Vietnamese man I knew that one of the soldiers was the one they called the Bummer. The fear was a real feeling, intense, discordant, even if the dream was uneventful, even boring. I was awake before either Richard or the Bummer. The cantina had actually been shut down. The only light came from an oversized neon Budweiser sign that read ud ser. The fire was now mere embers. The bartender was gone, but the drunk still occupied the seat opposite the Bummer. I walked outside to pee and found that thick fog had rolled in, so dense that I could not see the Cadillac, which was a couple of yards away. I must have either drifted off to sleep standing there, dick in hand, or simply spaced out, because I snapped to and discovered that someone was standing next to me, urinating as well. It was the Bummer.
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