by W. S. Penn
“Alley’s just realized that his father loves him,” Sara told her.
“Elanna used to tell me that father was a happy-go-lucky man, a boisterous man, before I was born,” I said. “It seems strange that it’s taken this long to connect the father I know with the one Elanna knew. I guess finding Death loitering about your son’s crib like a sleazy dope dealer would murder your sense of humor.”
Later, as Sara was falling asleep and I was lying with my hands clasped beneath my head staring into the monstrous dark, I said, “The world’s a funny place, you know?”
“Not exactly funny,” Sara said, yawning, her head sinking farther into the two pillows she slept on. “More a crazy place. Humor is just your way of describing it.” She rolled over on her side and tucked her hands under her head.
“That,” I whispered, “is a lot like what Grandfather might say.”
“Ummm.”
Sara and Delia and the Proctor fought valiantly against the glowering mood that descended upon each of them as Operation Sawdust approached. It was a contrast and contradiction to my own mood, which kept getting more amused. I understood and forgave, though even the Proctor heaved out sentimental statements about “finding one’s true children”—by which he meant Sara and me. I tried to convince them—despite Sara’s threats to wire my jaws shut—that while I could die, I wasn’t going to. I tried to make them believe that the tumor was not malignant, but I was left feeling, most times, like a baby in an oxygen tent looking out, raising his fists to show mother that he had it. They were unconvinced, and by the time I was to leave for Palo Alto, I felt like I was freeze-dried, crystals of myself that needed tears to make me real.
The weekend before I left, Delia and Sara cooked me a special dinner of my favorite food—green enchiladas, refritos, tostadas, chile rellenos.
“In case the plane needs help getting off the ground,” Sara said, doing her best to joke.
“I may not even need a plane. Just a soft place to land when the rocket fuel is spent,” I said.
Dinner was a quiet affair during which the scraping of forks and knives punctuated the erratic spatters of conversation. If I felt freeze-dried earlier, I began to feel as though I’d grown a large oozing pustule, Cyclops fashion, in the center of my forehead. I understood, at moments, that the silent heaving of conversation was for me as well as because of my leaving, and I forgave them. Other moments, I felt like a stranger on a subway, them looking at me only to look away when I looked back, pretending that I wasn’t really there and I was disappointed, angered, wanting to make them realize their proximity emotionally if not geographically, and then less angry at them and more at myself for not being able to make everything all right for each of them. “People have disappeared on me all my life,” I thought, pitying myself. “They are trying to make me not here.”
By the time dinner was over and we’d moved to the living room for brandy, I felt like a black Mormon. Against that feeling, I excused myself and went to the apartment over the garage, and wrote a note to Grandfather. When I returned, I brought with me a pot thrown and signed by Laura P. and a kachina of Water Coyote. The pot, its spiral designs spinning east and west on opposite sides, I gave to the Tompsons; the kachina to Sara; and only then was I satisfied that they weren’t disappearing on me but were only saddened by the possibility that I might disappear on them.
They understood the gifts without my having to explain, without me having to tell them that these were to be kept for me, not in remembrance of me, unless.… “But,” I reminded myself, “Death does owe me one. So, if ever, then now.” I said that as much to myself as to the luna moth beating against the window of the living room, as Proctor Tompson stirred the embers of the fire, refilled brandy snifters, and then stood, gazing meditatively into the middle distance.
People came by. Even though the Proctor was wise enough to foresee Sara’s wanting to spend most of the evening alone with me, he also knew that if we were to be alone too much she and I would only be sad, and I did not want sad. So he’d gone ahead and invited a few people by for drinks.
Doctor—“Professor, as yet,” he reminded me—Quinin dropped by to give me a leather-bound copy of The Scarlet Letter and an up-to-date authoritative bibliography of Hawthorne scholarship.
“I’m touched,” I said.
“It might benefit you to investigate some of the work on Hawthorne,” he said, accenting the second syllable of Hawthorne’s name in imitation of the way other scholars accented the first syllable of Thoreau’s name. As if it mattered.
“I doubt I ever will,” I whispered to Sara, who grinned courageously as I handed the books to her to set aside. “Still, I am touched.”
Captain Morrisey, bringing a six-pack of Dos Equis, arrived while Joanne and Woody were hanging their jackets in the entry hall closet. Sara was cool to Woody; but even he looked good to me, and I was happy to see Joanne. She had shared the first faint beginnings of my love for Sara and, though she had not entirely found love, she was as happy for me as when I’d passed German with her help. If that meant having Woody’s polyester smile sliding around the room like oil on the water, so be it.
“Hey,” Captain Morrisey said.
“Captain,” I said, giving him a salute less out of respect for his uniform and more out of friendship and gratitude for the evenings he and I had spent talking over pitchers of beer. The Captain had been the only one in town who understood how I felt as Operation Sawdust pulled me into it. He knew about facing Death, and he knew what it felt like to lose someone close to him to Death. Unlike my uncle, the Captain never imagined that his buddy, blown away by the Claymore, wasn’t dead. But then, the Captain had seen his buddy die, and the effects of a Claymore don’t leave much for the imagination to work with. I respected, more and more as the time had passed, the Captain’s pain, his way of keeping his friend’s memory alive. He could have been Indian, the way he could talk with his dead friend, know what his friend might have said—but for the fact that the Captain was Scotch Irish.
Morrisey was nervous, following me into the kitchen when I went for ice.
“Listen,” he said. “I wanted you to have this.” He handed me a box the size and shape of a jewelry box for a necklace.
“Before you open it, I want to explain. It may seem strange. But I looked around for something to give you to, well, wish you the best. Something to remember me by …”
“Besides my I-O from the draft board?”
He laughed. “Yeah. Besides that. Anyway, I did some shopping and nothing seemed to be the right thing. The other day I was sitting in my office after showing training films to some new cadets, thinking back on how we met, et cetera.” Morrisey said, “et ke-TER-a.” “The way you are, the way I am. What might mean something to you. I thought of Clarence and, well, I figured this might be something you would value.”
I opened the box. Inside was a jagged sliver of metal, shrapnel, I guessed, from a Claymore Mine.
“It’s …,” the Captain began.
“I know. Thanks. Thank you. I know what it means to you.” I tried to grin. Reached out to shake his hand and spontaneously gave him half a hug.
“Best of luck, ex-Cadet Hummingbird,” the Captain said.
“Ugh,” Sara said, when I showed the shrapnel to her later, alone in our apartment. “Do you think that it’s actually one of the pieces …?”
“I think so,” I said, laying the shrapnel beside the gifts my friends had given to me—the book from Sara’s father, the sliver of metal shaped like the blade of a knife, the E.P. Curtis photograph of Wichita Walter Ross the Tompsons had given me. Looking at these odds and ends, I knew how truly funny Death was, for certain and for sure, in the way his presence made people try to tell you that they loved you, and I realized that I loved all of them, at least in part because of Sara. When you love one person as completely as I did her, you discover that love is the one feeling that is not only infinite but self-perpetuating and self-increasing. Loving her made me able
to love the Tompsons, Captain Morrisey, Joanne, and it allowed me enough good will not to hate Woody but only find his actions at times hateful.
“What are you thinking about?” Sara said.
“Nothing.”
“You sure? You looked so sad for a second. I thought maybe you were thinking about why David didn’t bother to come by tonight. Have you talked to him lately?”
I shook my head, no. “Seriouser and seriouser,” I said, smiling. David had grown more and more serious and not, in my opinion, in a good way. Heavy described it best. He and I had fought over beliefs: He maintained that my beliefs made me flip; I maintained that his ought to lift him up not sink him in the quicksand of depression like a dinosaur. I still loved him, missed him; loved him enough to let our former friendship become a thing held in the mind like a relic that could be dusted off from time to time, even invoked as exemplary, but alive only in memory. I assumed he missed me as well, equally, which was why he would not have come by tonight to say farewell.
“I wasn’t thinking about David,” I said.
“What, then?”
“About how funny …,” I began. The look on Sara’s face made me stop and, my eye spotting the shrapnel which I would hang around my neck on a chain like the other talismen I bore with me, I said, “How funny it is that people keep giving me sharp objects, like knives.”
Sara’s foreboding expression became a smile. Relieved. “Come here,” she said seductively, patting the bed. “Maybe I could have you in my mouth tonight?” she whispered, her eyes glittering with that special sprightliness she could have.
“No. Not tonight. If you don’t mind. Tonight I’d like to be inside you.”
Afterwards, as I lay awake staring up into the Absence of Angels through the roof of the garage, counting the stars like sheep, Sara turned to me, running her fingertips lightly over my chest.
“Promise me one thing, Alley?”
“Sure,” I said, expecting it to have something to do with loving her forever.
“Don’t ever give up laughing.” Her fingertips slowed, becoming heavier as they caressed. Rubbing me always put her to sleep; were I to rub her, she’d stay awake all night, mostly because I rubbed her so rarely.
“I’m a lucky man,” I said, unwilling to be seduced by satisfaction into sleep. I wanted to stay awake all night long, to talk, to hold.
“You’re a wonderful man,” Sara said, doing her best to stifle a yawn. She began to breathe heavily, a sure indication that she would soon be drifting towards the Absence of Angels.
“Sara?” No answer. Watching her even rhythmic breathing and the depression of the dimple she had on her right cheek when she smiled gently I thought, “I am I.”
Drifting down from the Absence of Angels, Grandfather’s voice said, “It happens. Especially at times like this.”
48.
Father met me at the Pacific Southwest Airlines gate beside the metal detector where the security guards were hassling a dark man in a blue turban and gray beard, who was wearing a large button that read “Allah is Greater.”
“Than what?” I said to father.
“Oh. Hi, son,” father said, as though he hadn’t seen me walk up to him.
He drove me straight to the Stanford Hospital. His pauciloquence made me wonder if I had a dog I didn’t know about which had just died.
“So, how’s tricks?” I said as we cruised the Bayshore freeway.
“Huh? Fine,” he said. “I phoned the trading post. He’s on his way. Alone. Your grandmother just isn’t up to the trip.”
“Besides, Laura P. hates Grandfather’s driving. She says he doesn’t see what’s right in front of him.”
“Hmm. Fine,” father said.
“Did you know that the wings on planes actually flap up and down like a bird’s?”
“Fine.”
“Our pilot was stinko, though,” I said. The blank look on his face made him look, strangely, ageless, as though he might have been twenty-five as easily as he was forty-nine.
“Yes,” he said. “Fine.” He riveted the speedometer on fifty-five, obstinately staying in the middle lane despite the cars and trucks roaring past us on either side. Father had slowed down, some. “How was your flight?” he asked as we entered Palo Alto.
“Fine,” I said, laughing.
Father checked me into the hospital while I put my street clothes and my getaway tennies in a thin locker in my five-man ward, and changed into the backless shift that would be my costume for the next few weeks. Then he came down and sat beside the window, next to my bed. His head hung above his hands, which he kept opening and closing like a book he didn’t want to read but believed he should.
“Maybe you and I should go fishing, after this?” I said.
Father looked up from his hands. His lips were moving ever so slightly. “I’m not much of a fisherman,” he said quietly. “As you know.” He went back to lip-reading his hands.
I was almost grateful when the hard heels of mother’s flats could be heard clicking down the linoleum corridor.
“I knew he’d do something like this!” she shouted at the nurses working the nurse’s station. “He and his father. Just as I get everything back on track, they come up with something like this! Where is he?”
I could hear the tone of a nurse’s voice trying to calm mother’s hysteria, asking who he was, and then escorting her to the ward. The nurse gave me an oriental look and quickly disappeared.
“There you are,” mother said. Seeing father, she added, “Did you help him plan this?” Father just stared at her; his lips ceased moving. “Let me tell the both of you right this minute, I’m not about to let either of you destroy my life anymore.” Her head wavered back and forth like summer wheat.
“I’ll wait in the dayroom at the end of the hall,” father said, getting up and leaving without speaking to mother.
Mother clomped over beside the bed and opened her mouth. “Boom!” I shouted as loudly as I was able. She jumped. Boom did the trick, and her body relaxed like a tire punctured by a sixteen-penny nail.
“Hello, mother,” I said quietly.
Her eyes were frightened, pink around the edges like a rabbit trapped by a predator it doesn’t see clearly, and I realized that mother’s hysteria was not a form but yet an expression of love, concern. For a woman whose baby son was not supposed to have lived in the first place and whose eldest daughter had died by pregnancy, handling the forms of love would be nearly impossible. Where one time I might have been embarrassed or angered by mother’s behavior, I felt now very little but pity.
“Hey,” I said. “You don’t need to worry, mother. Everything will be all right. I promise.”
“Promises!” she said, the hysteria beginning to resurface. “Promises, promises …”
“I swear to you, mother. Tell you what. Why don’t you go on home and I’ll give you a call when the operation’s over. I’ll even come by your house when I’m released. In the meantime, try not to worry?”
“Well,” she said. She thought it over. Cautiously, as though avoiding dog-do on the floor, she tiptoed closer and touched my shoulder lightly with her fingers. “Well. Are you sure, Albert? You’re sure you’ll be all right?”
I reached up and patted her hand. “Yes. Now you go on. I’ll call you.”
“Okay,” she said. She tiptoed away from the bed toward the open door of the ward, looking a lot like a child whose balloon has just separated from its string and flown away. In the doorway she turned. “By the way. I nearly forgot. How was college?”
“It was great, mom. I did very well.”
After she left I was quiet, thinking about the things I might have said to her and wondering if any of them would have done any good. My ward mates tried to pretend as though they weren’t in the room and hadn’t heard the exchange between mother and father and me. The air hung humid with embarrassment. I didn’t care. Sara had long ago convinced me that a person can only embarrass himself, not the other person. Or was
it Grandfather who taught me that? It was Sara who’d said once, after I’d misbehaved at a party and was apologizing for embarrassing her, “Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to the others. Or to yourself. I still love you.”
Father returned and sat on the empty bed across from me, silenced, I assumed, by memories which could never be anything but private. Watching him, his shoulders rounding over a body that was just beginning to slump with the first manifestations of age, noticing his high forehead rising above high but flat cheekbones, I was struck by the resemblance he was beginning to bear to Grandfather. “Father has large pores, too,” I thought.
I was in the process of hoping that I, too, would look like Grandfather someday—which meant looking like father—when father raised his head with a willful determination and, keeping his face blank and unemotional, said, “Would you be quiet? You’re always shooting your trap off,” thus overcoming the barrier of silence mother had left behind her in the room.
The man in the bed to my right chuckled.
To his right, another man of about the same age dropped the magazine he had been holding up in front of his face and smiled, grateful that some one had said something. The dark-skinned boy across the room looked over without smiling, his eyes searching out everyone else’s reaction to father’s words as though he not only did not understand English but had failed to understand the attempt at teasing in father’s tone.
Outside the window, beyond the screening wall, was a fountain in the center of a lawn.
“This is a great hotel,” I said to father, pointing to the fountain. “Hotels always make me feel right at home. Even the decor’s familiar.”
“So,” he said, getting up off the empty bed. “You’ve got books and magazines enough? Is there anything else you want before I take off?”
“I’ll be fine, Pop,” I said.
“I’ll be here tomorrow. After work,” he said, shrugging as though to apologize for the fact that he would wait until after work to come by when I was scheduled for early morning surgery.
“No rush,” I said.