by Bob Tarte
Back in our bedroom, I fumed that I’d been ambushed by a person who visited funeral homes as a hobby. It made me even angrier to realize that I lacked the opportunity to take up the pastime myself. Our animals didn’t allow it. Feeding, cleaning, and following complex out-of-cage schedules kept Linda and me busy throughout the day, and to make matters worse, the big white cat that didn’t even belong to us had taken up residence next to my pillow.
“Linda,” I wailed. “What’s Moobie doing up here?”
“Moonbeam,” she corrected me. “You can’t expect her to stay in the basement all the time.”
“She preferred the basement at Ben and Ann’s house.”
“She was afraid Jamie might pull her tail.”
“How does she know I won’t?”
Linda had already started making phone calls in search of a home for the possible furry trigger for granddaughter Jamie’s asthma, but so far she had struck out. Linda’s son Ben had been on the verge of taking Moobie to the humane society when Linda decided she could live temporarily with us. “They might put her to sleep at the shelter,” his wife, Ann, had suggested. “She’s too nice of a cat for that.”
And she was also too old to find a new owner easily. Most folks wanted a kitten, or at least a cat that hadn’t received its AARP card yet. Aging pets were definitely a concern. Linda and I already faced a potential wave of pet extinctions, and after the loss of my father, this prospect seemed more immediate than ever. The furred and feathered friends that had charmed and annoyed us over the years had gotten long in tooth and beak, including Howard, Ollie the pocket parrot, rabbits Bertie and Walter, cat Penny, and assorted parakeets. Stanley Sue and Dusty were both around thirteen years old, but African grey parrots can live to be fifty or more, so I didn’t worry about them. I did worry about taking on a geriatric cat that might keel over at any moment, if a cat could keel over from a perennially prone position. And despite her resemblance to an unusually immobile pillow, Moobie had still created a rift in the existing social order.
Penny hissed from the stairs as I ushered Moobie off the bed, which had been Penny’s territory, after all. A visit to our bedroom in colder months often revealed a lump under the covers, courtesy of our reclusive grey cat. Though Moobie was happy to share space, Penny couldn’t abide another feline. I had to wash the interloper’s scent off my hands before heading upstairs to Penny’s usual domain, or she wouldn’t so much as glance at me. Sometimes washing my hands wasn’t enough. I needed to change my clothes as well. If Moobie’s aroma still offended, I was expected to also shave my head and roll around in catnip for a while.
Penny had reacted exactly the same way when we had taken Agnes into the house. A few years earlier, we had found the skinny black cat eating seed that had spilled from our sunflower feeder after an unfeeling husk had presumably dropped her off. Once Agnes convinced us that we should let her stay by feigning total disregard for anything with feathers, Penny retreated upstairs to make the guest bedroom her fortress. It had taken months for Penny to come back downstairs and attempt her first burrow under the bedcovers.
When the weather was warm, Agnes didn’t even stay in the house during daylight hours. Her athletic love of the wild outdoors made her especially disdainful of Moobie. From what I could determine, she considered Moobie’s shuffling, easygoing manner an insult to catdom and its ideals of aloofness and fussiness.
Agnes growled at Moobie from the couch as I herded the great white wonder into the dining room. “She can sleep in there,” I told Linda. Once our birds were covered for the night, Agnes completely ignored them, while Moobie wouldn’t pay attention to a bird unless it stole her space on my side of the bed. Even then, she would simply glare at it until it flew away out of sheer boredom.
Around five-thirty the next morning, I was awakened by the oddest noise. It wasn’t a bloodcurdling howl or the burble of an unknown primate this time. It resembled a cross between a thumping and a scraping, a kind of drum solo using padded mallets. Hauling myself out of bed, I realized that the source of the disturbance was Moobie raking the bedroom door from the other side with her clawless front paws. Wondering what was up, I followed her sleepily into the bathroom. She hopped onto the toilet—fortunately, the lid was down—then from the toilet to the sink, from which vantage point she fixed me with her best bird-intimidating stare, until I realized that she wanted the water turned on. Too bleary to resist, I accommodated her. She continued giving me the evil eye while I tried various velocities of water flow. Finally, when I had reduced the output to a rapid drip, she stuck her head under the faucet and proceeded to drink.
“You’ve got a bowl of water on the floor,” I informed her as I trudged back to bed. “Don’t bother me again.” I made the mistake of leaving the door open. A few minutes later she was up on the bed raining her soggy paws against my head, pummeling me with the unspoken command “Pet me, pet me,” and purring the whole time. I finally gave up, got up, hauled myself into the living room, and read The Far Side Gallery 5, fretting about what I might have missed in galleries one through four.
THANKS TO MISSED SLEEP, I wasn’t at my best as my sisters and I played archaeologists, rooting through my dad’s vast collection of papers in search of bank records, insurance policies, brokerage reports, and, in my case, insight into his relaxed but tightly buttoned persona. Bett chose a set of metal boxes from the bedroom closet. Joan opted for the backroom file cabinet, while I sat down at his desk in the sunroom. Excavating the uppermost stratum of the bottom drawer revealed a bundle of tiny diagrams that I hadn’t seen since Miss Edkins’s eighth-grade class. It took me a moment to reacquaint my brain with page after miniature page of his freeway-interchange designs. I remembered him drawing while engaged in what he termed “Just paying bills.” This semimysterious evening-long activity was primarily an excuse for smoking a pipe and listening to the radio more or less undisturbed.
Some of the freeway drawings bore names like “Lansing” or “Phoenix” and were paper-clipped to yellowed newspaper articles announcing the latest advance of the superhighway system across the country. But the majority of his interchanges were pure fantasy, though it was imagination expressed as straightforward on-ramp, off-ramp variations on the classic cloverleaf theme. A fascinating few designs consisted of impossibly complex spaghetti tangles, though. At first I thought of these as my father’s mechanical-drawing equivalent to the discursive modern jazz of the late 1950s. There was a certain similarity between his carefully rendered squiggles and the geometric shapes on the covers of his Eisenhower-era jazz albums.
But a subsequent discovery unearthed from the Precambrian layer of the drawer made me reconsider them as a kind of substitute for poetry instead. Inside a dark brown folder dated 1933, I found an essay he had submitted to the University of Michigan admissions office. “I have always wanted to be a writer,” he confessed in a two-page autobiography, “but due to the uncertainty of making a living in this field, I have decided to pursue engineering.” This bombshell of a revelation added to the enigma of my father. Left forever unanswered was why he had never confided this early passion to me in the form of support or caution while I bumped along a curlicued writing path of my own. As I was about to share this with my sisters, my disgruntlement withered—I pulled out a recent envelope that unexpectedly reduced me to tears.
Joan came running into the room. “What is it? What happened?” she asked.
“Linda’s artwork,” I blubbered. Over the last few years, Linda had drawn her own Christmas cards. In contrast to the stately beauty of the religious-themed cards themselves, she had decorated the envelopes of my parents’ card with whimsical doodles of Christmas trees, snowmen, Santa, and elves. These must have charmed my father, because he had cut them out and saved them.
“Do you want me to take over the desk for you?” asked Bett, who was sorting through old deeds, licenses, certificates, and canceled checks on the dining room table. One of the checks from 1960 that she had shown me read, “B
ob’s Mole Removal,” on the comment line. Another from 1957 stated: “Muffin’s Spaying.”
“No, no,” I told her. “Finding the pictures just surprised me. He sure liked Linda, didn’t he?” And from the checks he’d saved, he apparently held a special place in his heart for dermatologists and veterinarians, too.
Grabbing a file folder titled “Warranties” and moving to the couch, I took a break from quarrying the drawers as my mother came into the living room. Five days had passed since my father’s death, and she still wore a look of disbelief. “Joan and I are going to take turns driving you to church from now on,” I told her.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” she said. “I can walk to church.” And she could, in the same sense that I could walk to Nova Scotia, but it wasn’t practical. “Do you want a can of pop?” she asked before melting back into the kitchen chores. She had asked me the same question twice already that afternoon, but I wrote it off to her distracted state of mind. She wasn’t a woman who was shaken easily. When I was a tyke, she had opened the lid of a pressure cooker at the wrong moment and doused herself with scalding water, ending up in the hospital. Throughout the ordeal, she had kept her composure. But I didn’t trust her calm this time.
Unlike my mom, I could be unraveled by less life-shattering events. That same morning just before breakfast, while checking my e-mail, I had happened to glance at the parson’s table. In plain sight at the bottom of a stack of CDs was the missing National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Weather that should have been there all along, but somehow wasn’t. I simply stared at it, wondering if I was in the middle of a dream and annoyed that the dream didn’t involve dancing elves or talking furniture.
“Did you find this somewhere and put it upstairs?” I asked Linda, carefully positioning the book beside my breakfast plate. I kept an eye on it while I fed the parrots bits of fried egg, as if the field guide might scoot off on its own.
“I didn’t touch it,” she told me, and I absolutely believed her. Linda was incapable of telling a lie. A thug could show up at the front door waving a gun and ask her point-blank, “Is that stupid husband of yours home, so I can put a bullet through his head?” If she knew for a fact that I was, she would suffer a crisis of conscience over having to deceive my prospective murderer.
I found myself obsessing about the field guide as I sat on my parents’ couch. This wasn’t by a long shot the first time the book imp had performed his dislocation trick. A few months earlier, a short stack of books on my desk had suddenly sprouted a shortwave-radio reference guide that hadn’t been in the stack hours earlier. Linda had complained about similar events, though she tended to blame the book imp for problems that clearly weren’t part of his job description, such as misplaced eyeglasses or missing coffee mugs—“Someone is coming into our house and stealing them,” she’d insist. His favorite stunt wasn’t as dazzling as snatching a book out of thin air, then replacing it later. He was most fond of obscuring the spine of a particular volume in my bookcase while someone I wanted to lend it to tapped a foot downstairs. As soon as my friend had pulled out of our driveway with a spray of loose gravel and without the book, the clouds that had obscured its location would lift, and a beam of sunlight would fall precisely upon the title.
I was wondering whether or not the hose demon shared shop-talk with the book imp when Bette Ann exploded in laughter, drawing Joan, my mom, and me into the dining room. Spread across the table was a complex chart consisting of what turned out to be thirty sheets of graph paper carefully taped together and folded in accordion fashion.
“He always liked to track his stocks,” said my mother.
“These aren’t stocks,” Bett said. “This is a graph of Big Ten basketball games dating back to the 1968 season.” My dad had used three colored pencils plus black to draw the chart, with black indicating most of the teams and blue representing the University of Michigan. Green and orange designated, respectively, archrivals Michigan State University and Ohio State University. Lighter shadings of each color juxtaposed the previous year’s performance of these three teams, while squares, circles, triangles, and diamonds indicated … well, we couldn’t figure out exactly what they meant.
“I’ll bet a U of M graduate would love to get his hands on this,” said Bett, who had been the only member of the family to share my dad’s interest in college sports. The sound of my dad hooting and laughing at successful plays had reverberated through the house for decades and startled several of my friends. “Do you mind if I keep this?” she asked.
“He’d want you to have it,” said Joan.
“Not that I know what I’ll do with it.”
When I sat back down on the living room couch, I realized that the pen I had borrowed from Bett was missing. After a search of the floor came up empty, I removed one of the couch cushions to receive another jolt. Staring me in the face was the copy of the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Weather that I had given Bett’s husband, Dave, for Christmas. Apparently he had brought it with him from Fort Wayne to thumb through in between funeral-home visits and had forgotten where he’d put it.
So the book imp had restored the same book title to me twice within five hours. As borderline paranormal performances went, this was a solid tour de force.
IN VARIOUS SECTIONS of my dad’s desk I excavated songs he had written in high school complete with his own musical notation system, memos from his job as a civilian engineer for the Department of the Navy during World War II, a hand-drawn floor plan of the bathroom, a list of personnel in Bob Crosby’s Bobcats, a complete set of Keeler Brass Company pay stubs from the 1960s, letters from his sister Aba, a journal of dizzy spells including dates and descriptions, ancient instructions for my mom on how to start his Studebaker, a heavily underlined Shell Oil Company ad torn from an issue of Time magazine, and the names of friends and family members who had seen his slides of Egypt, Thailand, Morocco, and Mexico. I hated the thought that the only written record of his life was this nonnarrative diary.
“How did it go?” Linda asked as I slumped through the front door of our house holding a few of my father’s big band CDs, his slide rule, and a cassette tape on which he had introduced his favorite Duke Ellington Orchestra soloists.
“Moobie, get out of the way.”
She had planted herself directly in my path and, because I was far less intimidating than Agnes, she refused to move. I had to walk around her—and considering her size, it was quite a walk—to deposit the small heap of my father’s things on the carpet in front of the entertainment center. She followed me into the bedroom for a nap. As I slept, she lay beside me, pressed against my leg. She didn’t once bat my head with her feet and demand that I pet her, though upon awakening I was ordered to accompany her to the bathroom sink and adjust the trickle of water just so.
“Pest,” I said in a low voice so that Linda wouldn’t hear. And that reminded me.
“I still can’t get over it,” I told Linda after describing the second appearance of the book.
“Remember when I was reading The Outline of History?” Linda asked. “I couldn’t sleep one night, so I took it upstairs and set it on the floor in Penny’s room. The next night it was gone. I looked everywhere. Remember, I asked if you had seen it? Later it was right in the middle of the floor again. Are you sure you didn’t put it there?”
I shook my head. “The book imp,” I told her.
“How does he know where everything in the house is?”
“What do you mean?”
“He has to know where everything is in order to put it back again in the right place.”
I thought about that for a while and drew the usual blank. As far as I was concerned, his choice of books, eyeglasses, and coffee mugs was the least impressive aspect of his craft. The essential mystery was where things went when they were taken from us—those things that were so well accounted for but then one day simply vanished. Where was my National Audubon Society Field Guide to North Amer
ican Weather before it reappeared on my parson’s table? And where had my dad gone? I kept looking at his things next to the entertainment center, but I couldn’t find a clue.
CHAPTER 3
Ask an Expert
Absurdity loves company. That’s an elusive yet immutable law of nature, like gravity or the seventhinning stretch. A few months after my father’s death, the solemnity of his passing surrendered to an unprecedented barrage of silliness. As if to mock his levelheadedness, people who should have known better cropped up to offer pointless comments, proffer worthless advice, or just generally torment me.
My mom was in her front yard watering the impatiens when her longtime across-the-street neighbor Judy Teany strolled up the driveway to tell her, “Don and I really hate it that you have to eat dinner alone.”
Thinking that an invitation for a meal was in the air, Mom answered, “It’s just not the same without Bob. Sometimes I think God took the wrong person.”
Mrs. Teany clucked sympathetically. “Whenever Don and I sit down for dinner and look over and see your kitchen light and know you’re by yourself, we feel terrible. So we’ve been having dinner in the basement.”
My mom reported this story to me over the phone.
“She said what?” I sputtered. I couldn’t believe I had heard the conversation correctly. But she repeated it, leaving me to wonder why her good friend Mrs. Teany was delivering lines out of a bad TV sitcom. A couple of weeks earlier, my mom had reported talking to a friend in West Virginia who had been planning on visiting that summer with her husband. According to my mom, once Mrs. Dorst had heard the news about my dad, she told her, “Gee, Bette, I don’t think we’ll be keeping in touch anymore. Now that Bob’s not around, Gene won’t have anyone to talk to.”
“Was that for me?” asked Linda as I stood next to the phone, trying to figure out my mom’s friends. It never dawned on me that there could be a different explanation for these remarks. But that explanation wouldn’t become apparent for another few months.