The Alumni Grill, Volume 2

by Tom Franklin

  And so went his day. He read the newspaper, front to back. He read the funnies. When he got a telephone call the cord was stretched to the very end of its length, but even then he had to lean a bit to his left to speak into the receiver, his right buttock raised slightly above the seat. Through the morning, afternoon, and into the evening sometimes, my father talked on the phone, read the paper, took notes, doodled, smoked, drank, and folded his soft yellow squares of toilet tissue while thinking about something—possibly me; I mean, why not me?—until, finally through for the day, everything inside sufficiently on the outside now, he depressed the small metal handle there, and the rumbling roil of the churning water full of all the crap he could fill it with began. You could hear it in the pipes.

  “Done!” he’d proclaim, standing, taking a breath in deeply. Then he’d wash his hands beneath a stream of steaming hot water, glancing up at his reflection in the mirror, pleased. He was pleased, because the job he had come here to do had been done. In the mirror’s reflection he saw me, waiting in the bedroom. He smiled.

  “And what can I do for you?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Nothing?”

  “Just coming to say goodnight.”

  “Oh. Well. Goodnight,” he said, and after drying his hands on a towel he came and gave me the kind of hug that squeezed the air right out of me, and I went to sleep, and he left on his trip, and after that I never saw him again in my entire life.

  *

  The last time I saw him he said he had just read a book, that someone he was seeing, a woman, someone he was serious about, had told him about this book and he had read it and maybe it made a little sense. So he asked me to meet him on the field behind my old high school. “Outside?” I said. I couldn’t remember if we’d ever been outside together. I’m sure we had, I just couldn’t remember it. “Outside,” he said.

  He beat me there. I saw him and waved and he waved back. When I walked up to him he said, “Look at me. I’m out standing in the field.”

  “Yes you are,” I said.

  He threw me a baseball glove. It wasn’t my old baseball glove from when I was a kid or anything like that, because I don’t think I ever had one. It was brand new. He had just bought it. He had one too.

  “The book,” he said. “The book says it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.” He rolled his eyes. “So I thought both of us, we could do that. Have one. Together. Throw a ball back and forth. Like we never did.”

  I thought he must really like this woman, whoever she was. “Sure,” I said.

  He tossed me the ball and I caught it in the glove and I threw it back to him and he caught it and threw it back to me.

  “Time out,” he said, and he took his glove off and lit a cigarette. He put his glove back on. “Okay,” he said.

  He smoked, we threw the ball back and forth for a while, and then he said, “Hey. I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” I said.

  “For whatever,” he said.

  He threw me a grounder.

  “This is in the book too?” I said.

  He nodded, grimacing. “Says I should ask for your forgiveness.”

  We threw the ball back and forth, gradually becoming farther and farther apart.

  “So ask,” I said.

  His next toss was a little high. I backed up and jumped but I still couldn’t catch it. It rolled away.

  “Forgive me?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Of course.”

  He dropped the cigarette into the dirt and stamped on it. He looked at his pocket watch. He shook his head.

  “This woman,” he said. “This woman I’m seeing. You might meet her. I might introduce you to her. It’s getting pretty serious. The thing is, if I do, you have to tell her.”

  “What?”

  “That I asked,” he said. “It’s bullshit, probably. But I asked.”

  “I’ll tell her,” I said, and he winked at me, and he gave me a hug.

  But we never met, me and this woman, and I never even saw my father again. Ever. Not even once.

  *

  The last time I saw him he was very old. In fact, he was supposed to have been dead for three weeks by then, according to his doctors. But he had always loved proving them wrong, because that day he was very much alive, laughing and throwing his arms into the air in a kind of mock exasperation with the world he was getting ready to leave behind, explaining to me how he had told some doctor yesterday to fuck off—“I just said, ‘Fuck off,’ and that was that”—and how pretty his private nurse was, she was very, very pretty, and how all nurses should be so pretty, when people are dying they should have nice things to look at, shouldn’t they? Pretty nurses should be a law.

  He was even walking around, or trying to. He was nearly ninety and he couldn’t bend his knees so much, so he had to push his legs in front of him, one at a time, as though he were on skis. He called himself The Old Machine: All his joints were rusting up, nothing bent anymore, not even his neck, not even his wrists or his elbows. He was all the same thing now, one solid object, and when he finally died he said we wouldn’t even have to bother changing his clothes, we’d just lift him like a piece of petrified wood, shut him in a box, and bury him. And we’d all say so long to my father.

  “I see you,” he said, stopping beside the table in the foyer.

  “See me?” I asked. “See me what?”

  “Looking around at everything.”

  “So?”

  “So,” he said. “Be patient. It will all be yours soon enough.” But he shook he head, disgusted. “If it’s not the government, it’s the banks, and if it’s not the banks, it’s my own offspring. Hard to take sometimes. It really is.”

  “You’re not serious,” I said. “Tell me you’re not serious.”

  “I’m not? Oh. I’m sorry, I thought I was. Listen, son, I want you to have this,” he said, and he pointed to a vase he’d bought in China thirty or forty years ago. I picked the vase up and looked at it as if I’d never seen it before, when in fact it had been sitting in this exact place for the last twenty years, on the long wooden table beside the stairs. It was beautiful, colored orange, blue, and red, with dragons on it, and beautiful women too, and a horse.

  “It’s yours,” he said. “Happy?”

  “I’m happy with or without the vase,” I said.

  “Well aren’t we holy?”

  He glared at me.

  “Come on, Dad. Knock it off. What’s up? Why are you doing this?”

  “Because,” he said. He had already run out of patience with me, his idiot son. “You want it, don’t you?”

  “Dad—”

  “Fine,” he said. “Fine. For once I thought we could tell the truth together—in light of my condition.” He coughed once, twice, swallowed something. “Fine. Maybe I should put it this way: I’m getting rid of everything. Obviously, I can’t take it with me. That’s what they say, anyway. I have a will, of course—nothing to worry about on that score. But some things,” he said, smiling now, or his version of a smile, “some things I want to give away in person.”

  He coughed, shaking terribly, covering his mouth with his hand. This went on for some time. The coughing became harsher, and as his face turned a purplish red and the veins on his forehead swelled blue, I prepared myself for his death, here and now. But then he stopped coughing, took a couple of breaths, and without a word resumed his shuffle.

  I followed, the vase tucked into the crook of my arm.

  “What are you doing?” he asked me.

  He stopped walking, and swiveled in my direction for a better look.

  “What?”

  “With the vase,” he said. “What are you doing with the vase?”

  “I’m taking it. You gave it to me.”

  “I know I gave it to you. I know that. But take it—after,” he said. “Please. You can have it after.”

  “After,” I said. “Okay. Fine,” and replaced the vase on the table, relieved
, actually, not to have to carry the thing around.

  “I’ve always liked this wallpaper,” he said then, apropos of nothing, and I gave him a little pat on the shoulder. Every weird or incongruous thing he said I attributed to the circuits in his brain malfunctioning, but maybe that wasn’t fair: People, even those with long lives ahead of them, often speak their random thoughts. Still, dying is an excuse for almost anything: Sometimes, without apology, he farted. What, after all, is one supposed to think about that?

  I followed him down the hallway. We ended up in his den, where he had a couple of overstuffed red chairs to sit in. The walk had exhausted him, apparently: His shrunken little body collapsed into the big cushions and was almost swallowed up.

  “Your mother’s doing well?” he asked, his eyebrows raised like little flags above his glasses.

  “Well enough,” I said. “You haven’t spoken to her?”

  “No, no, we’ve spoken,” he said, as though the topic no longer interested him. “We speak on occasion. But who knows? Maybe things are bad for her and she figures she can pretend they’re not ’til…after. For my sake. To protect my feelings.”

  “She’s actually fine.”

  “Because I’m so sensitive,” he said.

  “She’s fine.”

  “Good, good,” he said. “I think I’ll leave her something, too. Like all my kitchen stuff. A great cook, your mom. She’ll like that, won’t she, son?”

  I said she would, though I thought she’d give most of it to the Salvation Army. Who wants somebody’s old forks and knives, their egg-encrusted spatulas?

  Now he was watching me, and I met his gaze, because if I looked away, even briefly, he assumed I was cataloguing my future take.

  “You don’t have to pretend with me,” he said. “Honest. I know why you’re here. Why you make these little final visits.”

  “You do?”

  “It’s because you want something from me, isn’t it?”

  “Dad—”

  “Isn’t that right?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s wrong.”

  “Really?” he said, his anger blanketed by his illness. “Really? Because you’ve always wanted something from me. Isn’t that true?”

  “I think that’s true,” I said. “But—”

  “No,” he said. “Don’t tell me. Let me guess.”

  And then over the next few minutes he became nearly frantic, pointing to objects around the room he was sure I craved. The obsidian paperweight? I yearned for that, didn’t I? Well it was mine. His turquoise-handled letter opener? Very old, very rare—mine! His library, his Cross pen set—even, he said, a certain small French watercolor—all mine! And he hoped I was satisfied.

  And I think I was, finally. I’d had enough of him. Leaving wasn’t easy, though, not knowing, as I couldn’t know, whether there would be any coming back. But he had become almost deranged, I thought, sick with the fear of death, and I couldn’t watch him be this way anymore. So I stood and told him I would call him later that evening. He almost stood, too, he tried to, but his body decided against it.

  “I’m not finished,” he said, glaring at me, shaking.

  “Well, I am,” I said, and sighed. “For the day anyway.”

  “Just one more thing, then,” he said, catching his breath. “Please? For me?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “What you’ve really wanted.” He said it as though he were a showman, eager and mysterious. But I was weary.

  “Okay. What is it, Dad?”

  He was silent for a moment, looking at me, building the suspense.

  “My watch,” he said.

  “Your watch?”

  “It’s yours,” he said, smiling, his eyes almost closed now, as if in sleep. “I want you to have it.”

  “The pocket watch?” I said, sitting again, facing my father in his chair. “Your pocket watch? The—that watch?”

  “The very one.”

  “But, Dad—you know—you know I love that watch. I’ve always loved that watch.”

  “I know you do,” he said softly. “I know that. That’s why I’m giving it to you, son.”

  “Well, thanks then,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Another moment passed.

  “Do you think…”

  “What?” Eyes wide, smiling slightly, pleased with himself.

  “Do you think I could see—”

  “The watch?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m afraid not. Not until after.”

  “I know, I don’t mean to keep it, just—”

  “I don’t even want you to touch it,” he said in a harsh whisper, a bit of white spittle collecting at the corner of his lips. “Not until I’m dead.”

  I leaned back in my chair and looked at him. He looked at me, too, filled with knowing.

  Because that watch was something. How I’d loved to hold it when I was a kid, and feel its smooth golden back, the glass lightly scratched by pocket change. I remember being hypnotized, staring at the movement of the elegantly tapered hands moving around the bold, black Roman numerals, stately and serious. I especially liked how it had the phrase 8 DAYS printed on its bone-white face just below the XII, this to indicate how long it would run after a good winding. It was a hundred years old or more, just a little older than my father was himself, and still it kept perfect time. I heard it ticking even then, snug in his vest pocket, and I wondered how long it had been since he wound it last, how many days were left.

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Authors

  Matt Brock recently received his M.F.A. degree from the University of Mississippi. He lives with his wife, Amber, in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he’s at work on a novel.

  Brock Clarke teaches creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of the novel The Ordinary White Boy and the short story collections What We Won’t Do and Carrying the Torch. His short fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications including New Stories from the South, the 2004 Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Southern Review, and The Believer.

  Joe Formichella’s “Fishtraps” was previously published in Yalobusha Review and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is the author of the novel The Wreck of the Twilight Limited and a nonfiction book, Here’s to You, Jackie Robinson: The Legend of the Prichard Mohawks. He currently lives in Fairhope, Alabama.

  Juliana Gray is the author of The Man Under My Skin and the poetry chapbook History in Bones. She teaches English at Auburn University and a summer poetry workshop at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference.

  Donald Hays teaches creative writing at the University of Arkansas and is the author of the story collection, Dying Light, and the novels The Dixie Association and The Hangman’s Children.

  Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of Corpus Christi: Stories (Random House, 2004). His work appears in The Paris Review, Tin House, and Stories from the Blue Moon Café III and IV. He can be reached at www.bretanthonyjohnston.com.

  Suzanne Kingsbury is the author of two novels, The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me and The Gospel According to Gracey. In 2004 she was co-editor of The Alumni Grill with William Gay. Currently she is at work on books about the US occupation of Panama. She lives in Brattleboro, Vermont, and Panama City, Panama.

  Bev Marshall is the author of Walking Through Shadows, Right As Rain, and Hot Fudge Sundae Blues. She is visiting writer-in-residence at Southeastern Louisiana University, serves on the Board of Directors for the Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival, and lives in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, with her husband, Butch.

  Jack Pendarvis comes from Bayou La Batre, Alabama. “The Poet I Know” will appear in his forthcoming short story collection, The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure. One of his stories will appear in the 2006 Pushcart Prize anthology.

  Michelle Richmond is the author of the story collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress and two novels, Dream of the Blue Room and
Ocean Beach (forthcoming). She lives with her husband and son in San Francisco, where she edits the online literary journal Fiction Attic. Her stories have appeared in Playboy, Glimmer Train, the Mid-American Review, and elsewhere.

  Brad Vice has published fiction in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Atlantic Monthly, New Stories from the South, Best New American Voices, and Stories from the Blue Moon Café, Volume III. His story collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, won the 2005 Flannery O’ Connor Award.

  Daniel Wallace is the author of three novels, Big Fish, Ray in Reverse, and The Watermelon King. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his lovely wife and brilliant son.

  David Wright is the author of Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers. His work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, New York Newsday, The Southern Review, and elsewhere, and has been recognized with various honors including awards and fellowships from the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, the National Association of Black Journalists, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

  Editors

  Beth Ann Fennelly is the author of two books of poems, Open House and Tender Hooks, and a forthcoming collection of essays, Letters to a Young Mother.

  Tom Franklin is the author of Poachers and Hell at the Breech. His new novel, Smonk: A Southern, will be published next year.