by Noah Hawley
“Doesn’t he have a middle name or something?” Scott wants to know, leaning in, lowering his voice. “I can’t call him that. Dad’s name.”
She turns to Joe.
“Do you have a middle name?” she asks.
Joe looks up from the paper.
“Roscoe,” he says.
Roscoe? thinks Scott. Wasn’t that the sheriff’s name on The Dukes of Hazzard?
“Roscoe,” says his mother, “this is my son Scott.”
Roscoe gives Scott a gap-toothed smile and winks, returning immediately to the paper.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” Scott asks his mother.
“What?” she says.
He glances at Roscoe, takes his mother’s arm, pulls her into the bedroom, the thin, clear oxygen line dragging on the floor behind her.
“Who the hell is this guy?” he wants to know.
“Who? Joe? He’s Cindy’s father. You knew that.”
Scott thinks about this. Cindy is the home-health aid who takes care of his mom three days a week.
“Her father?”
“He’s a documentary filmmaker, a little down on his luck.”
Scott feels a tic start up in his right eye.
“As opposed to all the documentary filmmakers buying tuxedos at Barneys.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just, what do you know about this guy?”
“What do you mean, what do I know? He’s harmless.”
“Maybe, maybe, but how do you know? Did you check his references?”
“What references? He’s Cindy’s father.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s, you know, on the up-and-up. Does he know your PIN number?”
“Of course. He has to get me money.”
“Mom, no. You don’t just—you can’t go around giving everybody this very important, this very secret number. Believe me, I listen to a lot of calls, people who’ve been ripped off, had their identities stolen.”
“Oh, please. Roscoe’s not going to rip me off. He’s not that bright. And he voted for Nader. People like that don’t lie or cheat or steal. That’s why this country’s being run by Republicans.”
Scott rubs his face. He’s been here ten minutes and already he’s wishing he’d drilled a hole in his head when he had the chance. That way this pressure wouldn’t be building up behind his eyes at such an alarming rate.
“Is he staying here?”
“He sleeps in the guest room. I figured we’d put you on the couch.”
The thought of sleeping on his mother’s couch for three nights while Roscoe luxuriates in the guest room makes Scott want to take a belt sander to his own face.
“I could go to a hotel,” he says. As he says it, the words give him a shock of pure happiness. It’s perfect. If he went to a hotel he could control his exposure, come over around lunchtime, stay till dinner, then head back to the hotel, or better yet, out to find a beautiful woman who would make him forget his dead father, his alcoholic mother, his emotionally absent brother, the girl who doesn’t love him, his dead-end job. Right now he feels like he needs that more than anything, to press his head against a woman’s breast, a sweet, freckle-faced girl who’ll stroke his hair and tell him everything’s going to be okay. He’s willing to pay a lot of money to hear this lie. It has nothing to do with sex. If he were a little more clued in, a little more objective, he would realize that what he really wants in this time of ultimate despair is his mommy. He wants creamed carrots on a spoon, a mother’s cool lips pressed gently to his fever-hot brow. He wants a note excusing him from school, from work, from life. And yet the mother he has is just not the reassuring type. She’s not about to make him cocoa or scratch his back. You feel bad? What about me? This is more her speed.
“No hotels,” she says. “You’re staying here and that’s final.”
He sighs. It would never occur to her to make Roscoe sleep on the sofa. A strange man she met three weeks ago. He gets the guest bed, while her own son will have to fold into the deep slouch of her old sofa.
Scott believes but cannot prove that whatever maternal instinct his mother once had dried up sometime around 1990, when he went off to college.
“Open another bottle of wine for me, would you?” she says.
He goes back into the kitchen and gets the corkscrew. He’s been opening wine bottles for his mother since he was tall enough to reach the counter. Cutting the foil from the bottleneck, he has that familiar muscle memory, feeling before it happens the slow corkscrew bite as it grabs. He remembers being a kid, fetching wine for his mother, getting his dad another beer from the fridge. Picture a ten-year-old boy, laden down with booze, walking slowly, tongue jutting from the corner of his mouth, trying not to spill. Black Label, that was his dad’s brand. A couple of shots, Jameson, neat. Scott’s mother would drink Johnnie Walker Red, or, as the years went on, Merlot.
When Scott was thirteen, his parents started sending him to the corner store for cigarettes. Camel unfiltered for his dad, Vantage Blue for his mom. He would watch them rap the virgin pack against their wrists, tamping down the machine-packed leaves. Somehow the cellophane wrappers always ended up on the floor and the cat would chase them around, batting them. It seemed funny at the time, but then all their cats had to be put to sleep before they were nine, giant tumors protruding from their bellies, their hips. At camp, when other kids were making coffee mugs for their parents in ceramics class, Scott was molding ashtrays. This is how early the training starts. You know the cigarettes are killing them, but when they ask, you run to the store to buy another pack, anyway. In this way, Scott feels he has not been so much a son as an accomplice.
Every summer their father would rent a car and they’d make the seven-hour drive up to Bailey’s Island, Maine, the windows closed, air-conditioning on. Scott and his brother would spend the entire ride ducked down in the backseat footwells, trying to stay under the smoke.
When Scott’s dad got sick, when his liver went, he had to stop drinking, but he still smoked. Even after he was diagnosed with lung cancer he smoked. On the last day of his life, when he had to be carried to dialysis on a stretcher, when he had only eight hours to live, Joe made the orderlies stop in the parking lot so he could have a final cigarette. He was on liquid morphine at this point, a skeletal lump shivering under a blanket, but he asked them to stop, and they did, and the two orderlies stood patiently in a misty drizzle, waiting while Scott’s father smoked one last cigarette. When Scott thinks about this he feels something like pride at what a tough guy his father was. This was a man who believed in controlling his own death. Fuck the doctors. Fuck the government with their ban on smoking indoors. You could have put a skull and crossbones on the front of the pack next to a picture of a withered, blackened lung and his dad still would have smoked.
And then Scott thinks, That doesn’t make him tough. That makes him weak. He was an addict. He needed that cigarette. He was powerless against the yearning. Each cigarette was a mile marker on his father’s scenic road to death.
Maybe that’s why they decided to cremate him. Why men in overalls took Joe’s sixty-eight-year-old corpse, put it in a big cardboard wrapper, and smoked it. Because what was Joe Henry in the end but a giant cigarette?
When Scott’s mother was diagnosed with emphysema, she had to quit smoking. What once she and Joe were able to achieve alone—that smoky, boozed-up hum—they now needed each other to manage. She inhaling his delicious secondhand smoke, he trying to build some kind of contact high from her dark, grapey breath. Together they made one fully dysfunctional person.
Scott finishes pouring his mother another glass of wine, then excuses himself and goes to the bathroom. Inside he checks his phone to see if Kate has somehow called and he missed it. She hasn’t. He sits pants-up on the toilet and thumbs through his contact list. He has one of those PDA phones where you can take pictures of your friends and the pictures come up onscreen when they call. He goes through his directory and finds Kate’s picture. Look
ing at it calms him. Her slim, aquiline face, the seductive crazy of her eyes.
Almost as soon as it starts, the calm recedes, replaced by panic, by the deep-marrow certainty that she was his last chance at happiness. That from here on out all he has to look forward to is rejection and loneliness, and the only woman in his life is going to be his mother. She will move down to San Francisco and they will get a place together. He can open wine bottles for her around the clock, and every morning she can needle him about when he’s going to get a real job.
His fingers are itchy. He wants to push SEND, wants to dial Kate’s number, but what would he say? This girl is no good. She’s poison. His father is dead, for God’s sake, and all she can think about is herself. She is the boxing glove he’s been using to punch himself in the face. And yet the need in him is so strong, the sharp Neanderthal craving. Maybe this is his addiction, all these lunatic women. The drama they carry with them in their cute little handbags, the crazy, idealistic, romantic rush they exhale with every breath, like smoke. He imagines himself laid out on a stretcher on the last day of his life begging the orderlies for just one more promiscuous blonde.
Please, he will say. Just one. For old times’ sake.
“Are you okay in there?” his mother asks, knocking on the door.
“Just a minute.”
He stands, flushes, throws water on his face. It is seven in the evening. He has another sixty-four hours in this godforsaken place. Looking at himself in the mirror, he has no idea how he’s going to make it, and yet what choice does he have? You do what has to be done.
He emerges from the bathroom running a hand through his hair.
“So I figure I’ll drive over to Aunt Barbara’s place tomorrow and pick up Pop’s ashes,” he says. His mother is back on her barstool at the kitchen island, sipping her wine. This is where she always sits, like her apartment is just one big bar where they never use the words Last call.
“Oh, they’re already here,” his mother says. “Barbara brought them over this morning.”
She points to the coffee table. There, in the center, is a small pine box, about the size of an encyclopedia. Scott stares at it. For a second all the sound in the room disappears and there is only the beating of his heart, the sound of his own breathing. How can she be so nonchalant about it? he wonders. To leave them sitting out like that, next to a potted plant and that crazy Wizard of Oz cookie jar she bought at a tag sale for eighty-nine cents.
“They’re heavier than I thought they would be,” his mother says.
When she says this, Scott has this impulse to go over and pick up the box, to open the lid and look inside, but he doesn’t. It feels rude somehow, disrespectful. There is no more naked a person can get, no more vulnerable than when they’re dead. After they’ve lost the ability to protect themselves, to speak up (hey, put me down). You don’t want to mess with somebody’s corpse, his ashes. It’s bad juju. And yet he wonders what it would feel like to open the box and unzip the bag, to run his fingers through his father’s ashes. Would they be smooth like sand? He’s always heard a person’s ashes are coarse, that there are still pieces of bone and stuff inside. He thinks of all the movies where the grieving widow opens her husband’s ashes on a windy bluff and tosses them into the breeze, only to have the ash blow back in her face, get caught in her hair, inside her mouth. What would his father taste like if Scott dipped his finger into the rocky gray and touched it to his tongue? Like a cigarette, probably. Camel unfiltered.
“I was thinking Chinese for dinner,” she says. “Joe can go get it.”
“Roscoe,” says Scott.
“What?” his mother asks.
“Nothing. Chinese is fine.”
At this, Roscoe rises to his feet. He is like some strange hippie butler. He gets the menu from its spot and they look it over. Decisions are made.
“And pick me up another bottle of Merlot,” his mother says.
Roscoe opens a kitchen drawer, takes out a few twenties. Scott watches him, trying to discern whether the amount he took is commensurate with the expense of the dinner, the wine.
“I’ll be back,” says Roscoe and leaves.
They sit there for a minute in silence, listening to the gentle applause of raindrops on the windows.
“So, how are you really?” he asks.
“I’d kill a nun for a cigarette,” his mother says.
“I know, but it’s not gonna happen.”
His mother sips her wine. She has the beginnings of an old-lady mustache. Fifty years of cigarettes have made her face craggy, weathered.
“How’s your lady person?” she wants to know. “What was her name?”
Scott goes to the cupboard and gets himself a glass, pours himself some wine. He has been resisting on principle, but if they’re going to have this conversation, he needs a drink.
“Kate,” he says. “She’s crazy.”
“You like them that way, I thought. Crazy.”
“Well, yes, but this one took the prize.”
He imagines the prize, like a page in the high-school yearbook, a picture of Kate under the heading Most Likely to Develop a Fear of Intimacy So Profound It Makes Her Incapable of Carrying on a Real Relationship. He could special-order a plaque, some kind of trophy, a bronze-and-plastic statue of a woman in high heels, holding a tiny bunny over a pot of boiling water. They could hold a ceremony, an awards dinner. He pictures Kate crying onstage, trophy in hand, thanking her third-grade drama coach.
“She can’t be crazier than Georgia,” his mother says, “or that girl from college. What was her name, the blonde?”
“Kris.”
“That girl had a screw loose. Why can’t you meet a nice, normal girl?”
He considers telling her there’s no such thing. No offense, Mom, you unhinged nutjob, but I should know. At thirty-five I’ve dated a lot of women. It’s always the same story in the end. Scott believes but cannot prove that all women will leave you eventually. When things get tough. When something better comes along. Look at his mother. She talked about divorcing Scott’s father when it became clear his illness would be chronic, terminal.
“Are you sleeping much these days?” Scott asks her.
She shrugs. “As well as ever. I’m up and down all night.”
“Anxiety?”
She shrugs.
“Do you take the pills the doctor gave you?”
She adjusts the oxygen line under her nose. Wearing it, she looks like a little girl, eyes wide under giant glasses.
“They scare me,” she says.
“They’re there to help you sleep.”
“I know, but I’m not supposed to take them when I drink.”
Then don’t drink, he wants to tell her, but doesn’t.
“One thing is medicine. The other thing isn’t.”
She makes a face.
“Don’t beat up on me. It’s not easy, you know. You get to go home. You have your life. I’m here in the middle of nowhere.”
“I’m not beating up on you. I’m just saying. You get anxious. It makes you short of breath. The booze doesn’t help. It probably makes it worse.”
“I don’t drink that much. Just a couple of glasses.”
An hour, he wants to say, but again bites his tongue, because what’s the point? She’ll just play the victim, turn him into the bad guy. He’s never known anyone so reluctant to help herself, someone who goes to such lengths to justify her most self-destructive choices.
“They scare me,” she says, “the pills. You remember what happened last time.”
He sighs. She’s talking about her “suicide attempt,” the time last year when she had to be placed on a respirator.
When he got the call, Scott took the red-eye to New York—this was when his parents were still living there—and went straight to her apartment. Inside he found the chaos the paramedics had left behind—empty syringe casings, paper bandage wrappers, medical trash discarded in haste, the bedding thrown to the floor, and there, on t
he table beside the bed, a handful of empty pill bottles lying on their sides, white powder spilling out, and a couple of empty glasses, red wine stains ringing the bottom. Scott stood in her bedroom stunned by the wreckage. Deep down he believed but could not prove that his mother was too much of a coward to take her life. But maybe he was wrong.
He hurried over to the nursing home and found his dad up and dressed, sitting in his wheelchair. As always there was that disconnect between the father he remembered—the broad, bright-eyed bear with the hard belly—and this man—the drawn, scowl-faced recluse whose dentures now looked too big for his face, and whose clothes hung on him (worn brown corduroys too wide in the hips and leg, faded blue oxford, loose in the chest, covered with a stained knit cardigan [now that he was underweight, Scott’s father was always cold. He rarely undressed, even to sleep. At the same time he was tremor-handed and prone to spilling, and his sweaters absorbed the brunt of every egg sandwich, every wobbly Styrofoam container of wonton soup]. He had stopped taking his socks off a couple of years back, stopped bathing except under extreme duress. Like an earthen cheese, Scott’s father went through phases of stinking and being unsettlingly odor free. He had developed infections on his legs and feet, wounds that wouldn’t heal. The nurses now came by once a day and berated him into letting them clean his feet. His sneakers had Velcro fasteners, which he left closed, slipping the shoes onto his swollen feet with a slow grinding motion. He was stubborn. His sickness had become another part of his life he didn’t want people meddling in. His wounds were his wounds. His infections were his infections. On top of the dirty sweater he wore a blue wool peacoat that was too heavy for him. Once he put the coat on, he was barely able to stand under its weight. His legs, after all, were splinters. Any ass he’d ever had was long gone. Muscle tone was just a dream of youth. To top off the outfit, he wore a faded wool baseball cap, swag from some corporate promotion a decade past, its logo promoting a company that no longer existed. The whole ensemble, taken together, had a kind of shopping-cart-lunatic circa 1999 feel to it. [For a few months the year previous, after he had refused to trim his beard, cabs had stopped picking him up, assuming he was homeless.]).